Trend Micro Sues Barracuda Over Open Source Anti-Virus

Anti-virus firm Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks over their use of the open source anti-virus product ClamAV. The issue is Trend Micro's patent on 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'. Companies like Symantec and McAfee are already paying licensing fees to Trend Micro. Groklaw carries the word from Barracuda that they intend to fight this case, and are seeking information on prior art to bring to trial. Commentary on the O'Reilly site notes (in strident terms) the strange reality of patents gone bad, while a post to the C|Net site explores the potential ramifications for open source security projects. "Barracuda has been able to leverage open source to bring down the cost of security. Early on Barracuda was blocking spam and viruses at roughly 1/10 the price of the nearest proprietary competitor (that was only selling an antivirus solution). Barracuda has helped to bring down prices across the board, and it has been able to do so because of open source. More open source equals less spam and more security. Trend Micro is effectively trying to raise the price of security." Slashdot and Linux.com are both owned by SourceForge.

Yes

[niceone]

Trend Micro is effectively trying to raise the price of security

Um, that's what the patent system is supposed to do - to make it worthwhile investing in inventing things! Whether this is a reasonable thing to patent is another question, but you can't really complain about the patent system doing what it is meant to do.

Prior art or obviousness?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we really be bothered to break out those archived procmail scripts? We're talking about a functional equivalent of a unix pipe; novel or inventive -- I think not!

Go barracuda!

Re:Prior art?

[Thanshin]

Why not say that this behavior is the inadvertent result of placing 2 products, an SMTP gateway, and an antivirus client, side by side on the same server?

A lot of processes can be simplified in such way and still are original. A decision has to be made even if a process seems obvious after being "discovered".

Re:Prior art or obviousness?

[ElBeano]

AC is exactly right. This isn't worthy of a patent. Convincing the court of this will nonetheless require educating people who are likely to be clueless as to WHY this is obvious. To those who disagree, please tell my why this deserves a patent and why any sane admin wouldn't think of it without Trend Micro's help?

More likely

[Shivetya]

Pay us and we will let you protect yourself.

Re:Yes

[smilindog2000]

In short, you can't violate a patent in your head. You should not be able to violate a patent by typing. This is the simple dividing line between the good and bad patents I see scrolling across slashdot. We let Microsoft and other big American companies con Congress into this, and the rest of the world isn't dumb enough to go along. Sooner or later, we need to fix this... every year it hurts our competitiveness.

Re:Bandwagon?

[Anonymous Coward]

AV scanning SMTP isn't an invention, it's the very definition of freaking obvious. The patent is a joke.

Re:Yes

[troll -1]

Respectfully disagree.

The patent system is *not* supposed to raise the price of security.

The patent system is supposed to:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts [source: US Constitution [archives.gov], Article I, Sec. 8.

Making a profit from something as obvious as putting a filter in a firewall does little or nothing to achieve this goal. The largest patent holders (including IBM and Microsoft) all agree the system needs reform. But patent reform is a lot like campaign finance reform, everyone agrees there's a problem but no one really has anything they can realistically take to congress.

Re:My ISP...

[AndrewNeo]

The ISP probably didn't write their own virus-scanning software. They probably bought it, and the company they bought it from may or may not be paying royalties.

Punish the patent clerk...

[Anonymous Coward]

...by making him pay all the lost "possible revenue" the patent requestor might have earned if the patent had actually been worthy.

Re:Bad news for a lot of us

[bleh-of-the-huns]

While your statement is true, there is a huge difference between what everyday admins are doing within their organization and what Barracuda is doing. Barracuda are packaging clamav and selling it as a product (regardless of the merits or lack their of of this lawsuit).

Also, while I do believe the patent is overly broad, this is what the patents are for. It is not like Trend Micro is a patent hoarding firm, they do make products, in fact they actually make products that relate to the patents they hold, so I view them slightly better then I view Minerva Industries.... (the smartphone patent)

Concepts vs. Implementations

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that patents were supposed to protect my particular "solution" to a problem, not the entire concept of solving the problem itself.

Let's say that I invent a machine to separate cotton from the seeds. I am granted a patent on MY PARTICULAR "method and apparatus for separating cotton from seeds". That does NOT give me a monopoly on ALL machines to accomplish the same task. Someone else comes up with a completely different mechanism to accomplish the same task, now we have a competition without any hint of patent infringement.

Seems to me that the onus would be on Trend Micro to prove that Barracuda and/or ClamAV copied their precise implementation (source code) and used it in their products. Simply placing a virus scanner on the same server as your email and ftp services is in NO WAY a 'patentable' idea.

Re:Yes

[Alinabi]

But patent reform is a lot like campaign finance reform, everyone agrees there's a problem but no one really has anything they can realistically take to congress.

The congress is there to represent the People, not to rubberstamp bills crafted by corporations. As such, there is no need for them to wait for the private sector to take the initiative. They should just sit down, on their enlightened, elected asses, and come up with a law that really promotes the "Progress of Science and the useful Arts".

Re:Barracuda makes the problem worse

[svallarian]

I couldn't give a spit that the front end isn't open source. All I know is that I was able to get gateway level spam protection for under $5k for 200 users. Which would have cost well over $20k+ for a commercial solution that only works half as well. And, yes, I could have set all of that up from scratch and save a few thousand, but my time is better spent elsewhere.

Hang on a second...

[PinkyDead]

I must be missing something here...

I have configured for a number of my clients their own SMTP servers for which I charge. These servers are generally gateways with postfix as the server. The anti-virus is ClamAV which is called by postfix.

Or to put it another way they have 'anti-virus detection on an SMTP or FTP gateway'.

Does this this mean I have violated this patent? Or should the patent be rewritten as 'Patent 5,623,600: Installing software on a computer'?

Re:Granting frivolous patents should be punishable

[Rob T Firefly]

Firing whoever's in charge of it? Again, nobody would want to work there if they had to accept that liability.

Yeah, it'd really suck if those put in positions of power whose daily actions affect the entire future of innovation of an entire country were to be actually held accountable for the fallout from their bad decisions.

Re:Granting frivolous patents should be punishable

[Thanshin]

If you did that, nobody would want to work for the patent office.

That only means it's underpaid.

Lot's of people work in positions that would instantly fire them at the first mistake, and with much subtler mistakes than those we are arguing about*. They still like those jobs because, as long as they can keep them, they pay well.

*: I do believe that in patent granting there must be really convoluted and complex cases that involve very uses of previous knowledge in subtle ways. However I don't believe those cases conform the majority.

Re:Yes

[eurleif]

You should not be able to violate a patent by typing.

What if I type out code to program a robotic arm to construct a patented physical object?

Re:Yes

[FredFredrickson]

Had the land grab happened thirty years ago, and the patent office learned to deal with it then, this all would have been worked out by now. The hobbyist software creator didn't exist in large part thirty years ago, and the fights would have been between large companies like IBM and its challengers.

True that. Seriously, folks, who's got the patent on operating systems? Software that interfaces with hardware for you? That would be great. Software patents work great until it's something obvious that shouldn't be patentable, but who draws the line? That's what we're arguing here. An antivirus on an smtp or ftp gateway? In what way is that any less obvious than an operating system?

I'm going to patent writing data to hard drives, and make millions off this system in the name of progress.

Re:Yes

[malkavian]

You can happily copyright the code, but shouldn't be able to patent it. The physical object would still be patented.
You don't violate the patent on the object just by typing the code, or even executing it. You violate the patent by actually having the robot arm create the final object. You could run the code to your heart's content if it were operating in 'test' without creating the final object without violating the patent.

Re:Yes

[BSDimwit]

Corporations are often afforded psuedo-personhood under the law. Until this is repealed, corporations enjoy much of the same rights as a real person does, including giving money to candidates who run for office(moveon.org), endorsing candidates who run for office(New York Times), etc. I for one would love to see the day where corporations are not considered to be persons in any way, including paying taxes(all the profits go to someone and would be taxed at the personal level anyway), or sheltering guilty executives from liability when their decisions cause harm to actual people. Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-business... but I don't think its wise to grant rights of any kind to a non-person.

Some might contend that this limits freedom of speech, but I don't feel the rights as outlined in the Bill of Rights should be extended to unreal entities.