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."

What patents?

[supersat]

As I understand it, HDFS is just a clone of Google's GFS. What IP could Parallel Iron possibly own?

Oh wait...

"IP Nav told us that they could not divulge the details of their infringement claims -- not even the patent numbers or the patent owner -- unless we entered into a 'forbearance agreement' -- basically, an agreement that we would not sue them."

So they probably have nothing. How is this legal?!

Re:Would this work?

[femtobyte]

The problem is, when you've established that you're a profitable to trolls, they're much more likely to gang up to backstab you. I suspect the following wouldn't be entirely atypical:

Troll 1) We have patent! Give us meellion dollar, or we sue!
You) O.K.; here's $1M, but you've got to protect us against the next troll.
Troll 2) We have patent! Give us meelion dollars, or we sue!
Troll 1) Our board of directors take meellion dollar bonus for hard work! Now we bankrupt! Our directors find new job with Troll 2!
Troll 1+2) Give us two meellion dollar! Or double sue!
You) ... aww, shit.

Since the troll companies are generally just empty shell corporations for investor psychopaths, they have no reason to stick around to fight each other (knowing that, by the time they ever won a case, the payout cash would have long ago vanished into some other Cayman Islands fund). A company with a solid revenue stream from actually making and selling products, that's proven itself a juicy target for Troll 1, is just asking to be bilked twice (by the same leeches under a different corporate name).

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[fustakrakich]

Fines and jail time won't work. Asset forfeiture on the other hand could put a dent in this business. Just apply the RICO statutes. After all, it is racketeering.

Interesting idea

[istartedi]

It would be funny to settle with the troll and have something in the contract like, "agree not to sue me or my assigns" and then assign rights to all my software patents to everybody.

IANAL and have no idea if such a thing would hold up in court; but it's no more ridiculous than most of what passes for law these days.

Concerted lawsuits against linux? Who's behind it?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Another war against Linux? Do I detect a whiff of Microsoft's scent in the air surrounding this?
:>(
Thanks for the link, and that page has even more informative links. It looks like Rackspace won a dismissal against Uniloc for a patent troll argument [arstechnica.com] asserting patents on simple mathematical operations: rounding a floating point number up or down before performing a mathematical operation on it, rather than performing the math operation and then performing the rounding afterwards. The judge's dismissed Uniloc's suit stating that "simple mathematical operations are not patentable". [slashdot.org]
.
That patent was PTO#5,892,697 [uspto.gov] and only the first claim was asserted for that lawsuit.
.
Interestingly, the way the lawsuit was filed shows that Rackspace was being sued for deploying Linux servers, and the servers were claimed to be infringing # 5,892,697 because they ran Linux. Doesn't this look like another wave of concerted lawsuits and patent trolling against Linux? I wonder who the concert-master is in this case, waving the baton and funding this crazy patent assertion of rounding numbers before an op being performed rather than after the op is performed? Is there a whiff of Microsoft in the air?

Re:What patents?

[dbIII]

I'm told that in Australia that would be "demanding money with menaces", which is why the SCO scam never collected a dollar in Australia despite some people ringing up and offering to pay in the hope of doing a bit of entrapment. Where you are you can thank the Libertarian mindset that makes it perfectly legal to make unspecified threats of legal action to frighten people into handing over money.

Re:The only ones who win are the lawyers.

[Dunbal]

The winning side becomes the losing side in a flash. I'll tell you right now which side I want to be on when the torches and pitchforks get going, and it's not the "winning" side. Wealth too is transitory. It's often gone within two generations, and usually less.

Re:You are playing the wrong way

[CuteSteveJobs]

Yes. I met one poor troll victim whose knowledge of the court system came from TV dramas and thought they would get a fair trial. $$$$ later he discovered the system is rigged in favor of lawyers and trolls. No trolls. No business. Judges are supposed to be dignified and neutral. If you get one that isn't you are fucked. http://mokellyreport.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/sterling-reviews-of-judge-natalia-combs-green/ [wordpress.com] You are right. Play the game their way and you are fucked,