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."
Bayh-Dole strikes again (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting Dates (Score:3, Informative)
FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997. From Google's Corporate History [google.com] page, they describe setting up their first data centre in 1998.
Still absolutely ridiculous that this idea was patentable, and that the patent infringement case could happen this late.
Patent In Question & University Patent Portfol (Score:5, Informative)
I congratulated him on the several patents he just acquired. Although I can't say I was very happy about his recent moves.
Prior art (?) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:University with Patents? (Score:4, Informative)
Dont be so quick to shout troll (Score:3, Informative)
So , heres how it works :
1. Do research on some area.
2. Get funding from $Federal Agency of choice
3. Make a few students get PhD's doing research on this topic
4. Go to the office of tech licensing on campus and draw up patent
4.a Make sure the exclusive license clause is in the patent
5. ??? -> Form company and sit on board of directors
6. Profit.
Re:Just another patent troll... (Score:4, Informative)
The patent was for taking a single request, breaking it up into subrequests, then distributing the subrequests amongst multiple servers and then gluing the results back together.
So to make the required car analogy, its like taking a shopping list, breaking it up by area of town that the store is in, then deploying a separate car to each area and meeting back at home.
Re:University with Patents? (Score:3, Informative)
Research Grants (Score:3, Informative)
Generally speaking no, students do not pay for much/most research, at least not directly. There are of course lots of exceptions but research is typically paid for by grants (government and/or corporate) or various wealthy benefactors. A surprisingly large part of being a successful university researcher is being able to bring in the money to conduct your research. Certainly some tuition money ends up going towards research but it is a surprisingly small percentage, often nothing at all. My alma matter gets literally billions a year from the NIH and other sources other than students tuition. Some of the professors barely see the inside of a classroom. That said, without the students the universities would not exist and universities have a tendency to forget this fact when it comes time get out of the lab and to teach said students. It's not right but unlikely to change either.
As for whether research at public universities should be public domain, ethically you can make a strong case for putting it out there for everyone but legally it does not work that way right now. (see Bayh-Dole [wikipedia.org] act) Universities now have very large patent portfolios and regularly spin off companies, technologies and licensing. Often creates some significant conflict of interest issues.
Re:East Texas??? (Score:3, Informative)
Prior art? (Score:3, Informative)
One such example is Teradata [wikipedia.org], which had the database tables partitioned among many CPUs (done automatically on insert), each with its storage.
A query would be split automatically to all the CPUs, and each would fetch and return the rows matching the criteria in its part of the table.
The results are then combined from all CPUs and returned back to the application.
Later the CPUs were just emulated in software, as hardware became more powerful.
Prior art then