Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent 159
kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."
Re:We need a solution to the madness (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop offering services in Marshall Texas (Score:2, Interesting)
If one of those IP addresses tries to access your service, put up a nice, static HTML page declaring that it due to the local court's ignorance of patent issues and the resulting popularity of those courts for patent litigation, it isn't a good business decision to provide services to that area.
Have a nice day.
Re:Dont be so quick to shout troll (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you kidding? (Score:1, Interesting)
I Thought Google was Highly Secret (Score:3, Interesting)
And then there's always the specter of Prior Art raising its unwanted head.
Have these guys ever built such a database system themselves for sale?
Re:University with Patents? (Score:3, Interesting)
Except Uni's are completely free to ignore everyone else's patents in the course of their research, have access to all scientific software at much much cheaper "academic" rates, and can pay grad students slave wages ($15,000 per year for a 3000 hour work week is well below the Federal minimum wage). So while they behave in many ways like corporations, they have a number of government-issued advantages in the competition. Who'd have thunk it, the government giving itself an advantage.
Prior Art? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We need a solution to the madness (Score:3, Interesting)
A patent troll is someone who never intends to develop a patent but just sits on patents with the only purpose to sue those who infringe. In this case, the professor did not sit on the patent; he licensed it to Jarg, which is a company with real products.
This search method is Ancient (Score:2, Interesting)
Too quick to dismiss Northeastern as a troll (Score:5, Interesting)
The /. posts labeling Northeastern University as a patent troll or claiming that the patent should not have issued have been posted too quickly to be credible assessments of the morality of this suit and the worthiness of the patent. The current Wikipedia definition [wikipedia.org] is that a patent troll is "a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic." If the patent was obtained through lawful and ethical means, is valid, and is infringed on by Google, then how is it "unduly aggressive or opportunistic" for Northeastern University to enforce the patent?
Some argue that a patent troll is merely a person or company that seeks to enforce a patent but does not practice the patent. Maybe Northeastern University is not practicing the patent. Then again, the mission of most universities seems to be conducting research, not applying and commercializing research. Licensing research to companies that can and will apply and commercialize that research is one way that universities fund additional research. Maybe universities should have to give all of their research away for free. But currently they do not. And it seems unfair to fault Northeastern for exercising its rights while not pushing the scope of its mission.
Given how quickly Northeastern was accused of being a patent troll, and given that there was no discussion about the proper role of universities or any real analysis of the worthiness of the patent (which was filed in 1994...almost 4 years before Google was founded), it seems likely that some people consider a patent troll to be any person who tries to enforce any patent rights.
Maybe Northeastern is acting like a patent troll. And maybe their patent is worthless. But it takes more than a quick glance at the 20-page issued patent or the 6-page complaint against Google to come up with a reasonable assessment of these issues.
Some analysis of the complaint would at least show that it doesn't look like Northeastern really knows the details of Google's search infrastructure:
Then again, Google's code is not open to the world. If it was, more detailed analysis would be possible. How can Northeastern try to get access to the code? By suing and demanding it as part of discovery. Does this make Northeastern a patent troll? Maybe. But the alternative (aside from discarding the patent system altogether, at least for software innovations) is a system that rewards patent infringers who keep their source code inaccessible to patent holders.
Re:Interesting Dates (Score:5, Interesting)
Yuck. Glad I left that school. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not to say that NEU didn't/doesn't have some strong departments, nor do I mean to disparage anyone who is presently working their ass off there. I just didn't see it. This article strengthens my opinion of NEU as essentially "for profit" and not "for education".
Re:Former student (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Prior Art? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just another patent troll... (Score:3, Interesting)
How is this different from any parallel divide-and-conquer algorithm?