4/27/11

GoodMan

Google loses patent dispute over use of Linux

A district court in East Texas has spoken Google in the first instance, guilty of having violated with the use of Linux on its servers patents Bedrock Computer Technologies, Google has established in this region and in some internet media as a patent troll classified company therefore pay 5 million U.S. dollars in damages. 
The process opened in 2009 is about the 1997 and 1999 requested assigned patent 5,893,120. It describes methods and equipment to store and retrieve information with a hash technique, the external linking command and previous data on the fly "away (" Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on- the-fly removal of expired data ").

Bedrock said that the technique described in the patent would be used in Linux and has then Google, Yahoo, MySpace, PayPal, Amazon, Match.com, AOL, CME Group and the two smaller companies sued Softlayer and Citiware to sponsor injury. The latter two companies are exactly like Bedrock in East Texas resident and seem to have been included to obtain a hearing before a court in the region - these have a reputation, patent holders to be particularly sympathetic.

According to the Bedrock Linux kernel version 2.4.22 or 2.6.25 to contain code that uses the first two techniques set out in the patent. In the documents the process there is a reference to a file route.c that Bedrock has introduced as evidence. Other than it seems at first glance, turns the patent is not the simple implementation of a linked list, but to remove a concept to previous entries, while the list is searched for entries, taking ability to set a limit to be removed entries to ensure that the search spends too much time with the removal of obsolete data.

Google uses a homegrown Linux distribution, many of the other indicted by Bedrock companies are customers of Red Hat, and have therefore turned to the Linux distributor. Who then in December 2009 opened a separate procedure to be declared the patent invalid.

Google had in the 11 April started proceedings against Bedrock defended it, violating the first two claims do not, like Red Hat and Google, the patent describes as invalid. The jury of the court does not follow that Google and sentenced on 15 April. Bedrock has subsequently asked for an injunction to prohibit further use of the Google patented technologies - here on the court has not ruled.

Currently, the evidence suggests that Google is going to appeal. The company said it wanted to continue to defend against attacks such as those that focus on the open source community. The charges against the other companies and continue to run the Red Hat initiated proceedings.