patents

NetApp founder brushes off Sun threat

A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning.

"This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes this suit to reach court--NetApp will be doing just fine," Hitz said in a blog posting … Read more

Vonage, Verizon settle patent spat for up to $120 million

Updated at 7:25 a.m. PDT Friday.*

Vonage said Thursday it had resolved an ongoing patent dispute with Verizon Communications at a price tag of up to $120 million, ending what has been a mostly gloomy saga for the struggling Internet phone company.

The announcement comes about a month after New Jersey-based Vonage, which has yet to turn a profit, lost the bulk of an appeal regarding three voice over Internet protocol patents held by the nation's second largest telephone company.

The appeals court upheld a jury finding that Vonage had infringed on two patents that are arguably … Read more

SanDisk sues a score of flash storage vendors

SanDisk is suing 25 companies for infringing on its patents on removable flash storage devices.

The flash memory maker filed a suit with a U.S. District Court in Wisconsin and another with the U.S. International Trade Commission Wednesday evening, seeking damages, a permanent injunction and an order from the ITC banning the importation of the products.

The roll call of the companies is a long one, but here goes: ACP-EP Memory, A-Data, Apacer, Behavior Computer, Buffalo, Chipsbank, Corsair Memory, Dane-Elec, Edge, Imation/Memorex, Interactive Media, Kaser, Kingston, LG Electronics, Phison Electronics, PNY, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi, Transcend, TSR, … Read more

Red Hat swats Microsoft's European patent ruling

The European Union may have unwittingly played into Microsoft's anti-open source hands in its recent ruling. While initially met with cheers from the open-source community, the ruling has many, including Red Hat's counsel, Michael Cunningham, suggesting that all that glitters is not gold:

"We are reviewing the European Commission's announcement in the Microsoft abuse case and congratulate the Commission on the improvements announced [on Monday]. Our enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, however, by concerns that the patent arrangements may have not been made compatible with open-source licensing, especially given the pro-competitive effects to consumers of the open-source … Read more

Sun plans to countersue NetApp

Updated at 2:31 p.m. PDT: Sun Microsystems plans to countersue Network Appliance later this week, Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday, a suit that will include a request to remove the company's products from the market.

Schwartz said on his blog that he has "no interest whatever in suing them" and therefore "reached out" to Chief Executive Dan Warmenhoven. But, he said, NetApp's demands--that Sun "retract" its ZFS file system from open-source community and restrict its use to computing and not storage devices--can't be met.

Consequently, "Later this … Read more

Episode 589: The mother of all patents

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IBM patenting the fine art of patent trolling?

IBM is perhaps the most aggressive patent machine on the planet. In a move reported by The Register today, IBM has now taken a step beyond the pale (again) and sought to patent the art of squeezing profits from patent portfolios, otherwise known as patent trolling.

A filing at the U.S. Patent Office, entitled "system and method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets" stages a landgrab on the thoroughly original idea of letting other people use your ideas.

IBM's intellectual property carpet baggers describe the invention as "obtaining an interest in selected assets from the portfolio to a client who lacks the resources to accumulate and maintain such a portfolio, in return for an annuity stream to the portfolio owner." Or, en Anglais, patent licensing.… Read more

Microsoft closes another patent deal with the dregs of the commercial Linux community

OK. Novell is a credible company. But look at the other companies with which Microsoft has consummated its patent pacts: also-rans, all of them. Today it was TurboLinux. Seriously, does anyone care if TurboLinux's one remaining user won't be sued by Microsoft?

I'm exaggerating, of course. TurboLinux has a decent share of the market in China [PDF] and throughout APAC. But that's not saying a whole lot.

Microsoft has yet to do more than rattle its rusty patent saber, and guess what? It will never do more than this, because it can't afford to commit corporate suicide. … Read more

The EU opens up Microsoft. Kind of. Sort of. Not really?

With all the hoopla surrounding Microsoft's capitulation to the EU's demands over interoperability (see this and this, for example, though business journalist Dana Blankenhorn rightly yawns), it's important to remember just how far the deal doesn't go.

Mark Webbink, former Red Hat general counsel, explains:

So what has been accomplished? The Commission appears to have successfully forced Microsoft to open its work group server protocols to viewable access by all, including open-source developers. It also appears to have assured that such developers will be able to implement the protocols, at least from a copyright and/or … Read more