Rackspace Goes On Rampage Against Patent Trolls

girlmad writes "Rackspace has come out fighting against one of the U.S.'s most notorious patent trolls, Parallel Iron. The cloud services firm said it's totally fed up with trolls of all kinds, which have caused a 500 percent rise in its legal bills. Rackspace was last week named among 12 firms accused of infringing Parallel Iron's Hadoop Distributed File System patents. Rackspace is now counter-suing the troll, as the firm said it has a deal in place with Parallel Iron after signing a previous patent settlement with them."

The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[Anonymous Coward]

The laws must be changed.

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[crashumbc]

"The only ones who win are the lawyers."

-The laws must be changed.

Which is exactly why the laws won't be changed.

Once you have paid him the Dane-geld

[L. J. Beauregard]

you never get rid of the Dane. [poetryloverspage.com]

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Which is exactly how the laws got written in the first place.

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[jhoegl]

That used to be the case, but you guys are forgetting this is the 21st century.
Now lobbyists make the laws, and lobbyists are paid for by the winning side.

Patent troll E patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Patent trolls don't make refrigerators, they make patents. So there would be no waiver because they would have no reason to license the fridge patent.

Some of these are quite laughable, if you read the article, you'll see a patent on rounding floating point numbers with non standard exponents without changing the exponent size, i.e. what every floating point package did before IEEE standardized the representation of under and overflow case.

Putting aside it was a patent on math, the patent office thought to grant it, because there was no prior publication. Yet to be a non-standard exponent-mantissa, there has to be standard. So the actual new thing there, was the IEEE standard.

You see how clever these trolls are, the definition of prior art cannot cover all cases, the patent office chooses to issue patents by default, and so its quite easy to get patents on core things, and troll. Of course Rackspace don't know the history of floating point math, so they don't have the tools/knowledge to defend themselves, the troll can attack any number of similarly tangential businesses, hoping the risk is too great that they'll license.

Carmen Ortiz would love the patent troll world, when she's finally fired from the justice department, the patent troll world is a very similar.

Are the courts the enemy of the people?

[CuteSteveJobs]

The problem is with overinflated lawyers fees, court procedures which encourage paperwork which makes even more fees for lawyers and and court fees that the courts are so expensive you are looking at handing lawyers and courts two million up just to defend yourself from a patent troll. If cases were streamlined and it only cost $10K to defend a patent troll it would be far fairer, but lawyers and judges would be out of work. Have you ever heard of judges being laid off for lack of work? Judges whose communities depend on patent trolls for a steady stream of cases have a conflict of interest. If they came down hard on patent trolls and threw out meritless cases there would be boarded up lawyers offices all over town. Instead the judges say well geez better have a trial anyway just to be sure. It might get an answer but it wastes a fuckload of cash to get there. If the USPTO issued firm rulings we wouldn't need the courts. Instead the USPTO scratch their balls and say well I will just approve this shit because I can't understand it anyway and let the courts sort it out. The problem is as much the court system as it is the USPTO. They should streamline these but do you really think lawyers and judges will be putting themselves out of work?

Patents are written in bullshit confusing language so courts argue what they mean. A software engineering looking at one of these wouldn't even recognize their own system in one of these documents. Lawyers write them to be broad and confusing so they can make money arguing it. The USPTO shouldn't be approving patents that are unreadable. And if a IT graduate can't read one of these and work out what they mean, they shouldn't be granted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll [wikipedia.org]
http://news.cnet.com/8301-32973_3-57409792-296/how-much-is-that-patent-lawsuit-going-to-cost-you/ [cnet.com]
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/03/guest-editorial-throwing-trolls-off-the-bridge.html [patentlyo.com]

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[anagama]

Exactly how many non-geeks are actually knowledgeable about patent trolls? Two? Three?

Talk to most random people about patents, and they think: "lotto" -- invent something cool and retire. Try to explain what is wrong with the system and their eyes glaze over. The notion that patent reform will come from the masses and that they will demand change is .... wishful thinking? ludicrous? Crazy? Pick any word that's the antonym of "possible."

Re:What patents?

[dbIII]

The "government leave me alone" idea coupled with the "let the buyer beware" when somebody gets ripped off due to the government leaving things alone. Both are ideas pushed very strongly by people that call themselves Libertarians and ask others to vote for them under that banner.

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[Runaway1956]

"who wouldnt be first to line up and patent something if they actually came up with something cool?"

I presume that you're familiar with the name "Linus Torvalds"? Copyleft authors are legion and myriad. It's not unusual to see a license that says something to the effect, "Hey, enjoy my cool stuff, for free! If you really like it, visit my homepage to leave compliments or to make a donation!"

Re:Concerted lawsuits against linux? Who's behind

[Runaway1956]

Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second.

Is Microsoft parasitic? Undeniably.

For using the BSD implementation of this, that, or the other?

Uhh, no, I don't think so. Isn't BSD allowed to be used any damned way anybody wants to use it? That's the selling point of BSD over the GPL, isn't it? You can analyze it, use it, change it, make derivative works, then license those works as you see fit. It's appealing to industry, it's appealing to hopeful startups, it's even appealing to government and private individuals who are hoping to cash in.

Yes, Microsoft is parasitic, but not for using a BSD licensed software or method.

If BSD's methods and software happen to be the best, fastest, most secure, and most elegant solution in any given situation - take it and run with it. That's basically what the license says.

If the GPL people want their license to be respected, then the BSD licenses need to be respected.

And, lest I be misunderstood - I am NOT making an argument that BSD is better than GPL, nor am I arguing that GPL is better than BSD.

Game theory

[91degrees]

It surprises me that this hasn't become a policy before. Patent trolls exist because they know that the company will roll over if it's cheaper to comply than to fight.

Problem is, that only works for a single stage game. What we have is a repeated stage game. The optimal strategy for the troll victim is to fight, and to do as much damage to the troll as possible. This increases the cost of operation for the troll, and makes the victim a lot less lucrative a target for future lawsuits.

don't patent mathematics

[girlinatrainingbra]

re: IMHO, mathematics should not be patentable AT ALL and IN ANY FORM.
:>)
My humble opinion is that you are completely correct. I agree with you 100% (as that is the maximum allowed by the laws of mathematics, though the laws of idiomacy allow for greater percentages). Also, numbers ought not be patentable. Say even a 2MB number which may or may not be prime, but whose binary representation just might happen to match a Linux elf executeable file for the Macintosh-G4-powerpc architecture that has a standard debian operating system and libraries on it. That program is just a number; it's a very loooooooong binary number. But integers are just an element of mathematics. Again, I agree with you. But the devil's advocate made me say it!