20+ Companies Sued Over OS Permissions Patent 282
freemywrld writes "According to the article on Ars Technica, Microsoft, Symantec and 20 other companies are being sued over patents covering 'systems for governing application and data permissions, as well as ensuring application integrity.' The patents were granted in the 90's to the Information Protection and Authentication of Texas (IPAT). From the article: 'A response from any of the defendants is still forthcoming, and it is unclear whether the authentication and permissions systems that IPAT's patent describes are precluded by prior art. Even if IPAT has a leg to stand on in court, however, it certainly didn't take the easy route to recovering any damages by suing 22 companies.'"
Isn't it a bit late for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Considering that the patents were granted back in 1994 and 1995, isn't 2009 a little bit late to be suing some of these companies considering how long they've been around. I'm not a lawyer, but isn't there some limited time window where you need to sue someone who's been infringing on your patent.
If not, doesn't the whole patent system become rather predatory whereby some companies do nothing but patent ideas and wait until someone else uses those patents (perhaps accidentally) and makes a significant amount of money from them before suing their pants off?
Is there anyone around more knowledgeable in patent law who might be able to explain things a little better? I tried checking on groklaw to see if there was any coverage there, but nothing has been posted yet.
A Modest Proposal ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Try it and lose, the corporate officers, the partners, the corporate account, and the stockholders (if any) should be held personally liable) not only for the legal fees of the successful defendants, but also for treble damages. No bankruptcies allowed. That would be real interesting. Wonder how many bogus suits we'd see then.
Legal changes required: 1) definition of a patent troll; 2) stripping patent troll LLC's of their protected liability status; 3) stripping them of bankruptcy eligibility, both as corporations as as individuals; and, 4) loser pays winner's legal fees + triple punitive damages. Better still, add patent-troll lawyers to the list of liable parties. Finally, make three time losers eligible for life in prison, and strip them of the right to file or own patents. This would have no effect on legitimate companies that produce real products, such as those being sued by patent-troll parasites.
Now, mod me into oblivion.
Re:Location, location, location (Score:5, Interesting)
"IPAT, which apparently purchased these patents from their listed inventor of Addison M. Fischer"
Addison Fischer is sort of the man behind the men in a range of security-related make-money-from-IP deals. For example if you'd scratched the surface of RSA Data Security about 10 years ago when they still held a monopoly patent on the algorithm you'd have found him there somewhere, although you'd have to scratch pretty deep since he doesn't seem to like publicity much (he's an ex-spook, which may explain it).
Re:Texas cannot secede (Score:1, Interesting)
They tried that once, remember? I think it was called The War of Northern Aggression.
Contrary to rumor, Texas didn't join the United States by treaty. I know, I know, you never said they did.
What Texas did get was the right to divide itself into up to 5 pieces without asking further permission of Congress.
Uh, that document thingy that gives Texas the right to subdivide? It was called, let's see, oh yeah - the _Treaty of Annexation_.
Re:Botting (Score:2, Interesting)
Setuid + Setgid = Prior Art (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
What the hell are you babling about?
without producing real goods, the US economy is not making money. Cory Doctorow [google.com] does a good job in a portion of this video (starting at about the 9:40 mark) of outlining the last of the .com businesses.. the current US economic policy. Just like the majority of .com businesses, it is destined to fail unless it's changed. Politicians don't like admitting they're wrong, though, and thus we are suffering from the job hemorrhage and cash drain that's been going on since the late 90's.
intellectual property is not real, and is flagrantly disregarded by more than half the world's nations. IP is also not going to employ the several hundred million people of this nation.
Re:I'm Scared (Score:3, Interesting)
I created a group for each program allowed special access, and made the executable for that group "setgid" for that group. Then I used ACLs (not in vanilla Unix, but I believe AFS had them prior to the patent priority date) to make my files readable by certain groups and not by others.
Re:I'm Scared (Score:5, Interesting)
You may have unintentionally brought up an extremely good point: SELinux is/was developed by the NSA for security applications, and is presumably a matter of national security as an invaluable piece of their infrastructure.
Are they suing the US government?
Look at 1970s Capability Architecture Systems (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a strong chance that many of the claims in these patents have predecessors in the Capability Based operating systems of the 1970's.
Check out the Intel 432 architecture.
Check out IBM's "SWORD" project.
Check out UCLA Data Secure Unix.
Check out the Plessy capability systems from that period.
SRI did a lot of work in this area as well. And so did we at System Development Corp. (SDC).
The idea of a capability is a descriptor that defines access rights in an extensible manner - for example one can say that the disk driver can't deal with tape hardware or that a text editor can only do certain things to a particular SQL database.
Here is more prior art! (Score:5, Interesting)
And this should be all it takes
Novell Netware 286! [wikipedia.org]
The date is 1981!
Once again it is up to Novell to save everyones ass!
Entire model is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have agreed with you, except for the existence of, and rapid improvement of, Fabbers [fabathome.org]. Give it a decade or two, and kids/techies will be downloading designs to build what they need, and only ordering raw materials from amazon. Since some fabbers are self-replicating, not even making fabbers will be a safe job/revenue stream. Given that mining and other resource harvesting is becoming more and more automated too, ideas are soon going to be all that's left.
Essentially, we're moving towards the society the (fictional) Krell had. They were smarter than us, and their own tech wiped them out. Let's see how we do. One thing's for sure: if we stick to the RIAA model, we're all screwed.
Re:Entire model is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem here is your post proved that ideas aren't "all that's left." What good are the designs without the Fabbers (wealth) or raw materials (wealth)? The OP was right: without realization, ideas are just potential energy. So there is some value in having the potential for work around, but that's not nearly as much value as actually performing the work.
(Even if you consider the "automation" of mining and resource gathering, you still need real, manufactured wealth to perform that automation.)
The fundamental problem with basing an economy on ideas is that ideas are not economically scarce resources. If you made the subtle change to an economy based on the ability to create ideas, then I'd say you have a sustainable economy, because the ability to create ideas is a scarce resource. This is actually why software can bring in income, because the ability to create the software is scarce and you have to compensate the people who make it - yes, even those that make "free" software get compensation in some form, albeit mostly indirectly.
Re:It is real (Score:3, Interesting)
If you need actual evidence, take a look at the socialist countries of the second half of the 20. century: the prevailing idea was there that farmers and blue-collars are the ones that really do something - the "intellectuel" class was considered suspicious and kept as small as possible. Well, needless to say, it didn't do any good to the economy.
...which explains why darn near everything we buy here is made in China...