Cloudera Hit With $240 Million Patent Verdict Over Cloud-Storage Technology (reuters.com) 17
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Patent owner StreamScale won a $240 million jury verdict in Waco, Texas, federal court on Friday in a patent case against data-management software company Cloudera. The jury said (PDF) after a four-day trial that Cloudera infringed three StreamScale patents related to cloud-based data storage technology. Cloudera said in a statement that it intends to challenge the decision and that it would not impact the company's customers.
StreamScale attorney Jason Sheasby called the verdict a "referendum on the importance of small inventors and small businesses." StreamScale owns patents for inventor Michael Anderson's "accelerated erasure coding" technology, which the company's complaint called a "cornerstone" of modern data storage. It sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera in 2021 for allegedly infringing several of its patents.
The lawsuit accused Cloudera's CDH open source data-management platform of violating StreamScale's patent rights. Cloudera argued its software worked in a different way than StreamScale's inventions and said that the patents were invalid. StreamScale also accused other companies, including Intel, of infringing its patents in the 2021 lawsuit. Intel filed a separate lawsuit later that year arguing that StreamScale's allegations violated a non-disclosure agreement.
StreamScale attorney Jason Sheasby called the verdict a "referendum on the importance of small inventors and small businesses." StreamScale owns patents for inventor Michael Anderson's "accelerated erasure coding" technology, which the company's complaint called a "cornerstone" of modern data storage. It sued Santa Clara, California-based Cloudera in 2021 for allegedly infringing several of its patents.
The lawsuit accused Cloudera's CDH open source data-management platform of violating StreamScale's patent rights. Cloudera argued its software worked in a different way than StreamScale's inventions and said that the patents were invalid. StreamScale also accused other companies, including Intel, of infringing its patents in the 2021 lawsuit. Intel filed a separate lawsuit later that year arguing that StreamScale's allegations violated a non-disclosure agreement.
Should be thrown out (Score:1, Insightful)
StreamScale is not the inventor, they have no real rights over the invention. They bought a piece of paper, which to me, means nothing, other than they are a patent troll. I hope there is a successful appeal
Re: Should be thrown out (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly, patent trolls damage the future of human innovation, and they rarely suffer anything but a slap on the wrist if they lose. They deserve to be shot into the Sun.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm basing this only on my own observations. I think that countries with reasonable patents tend to have more innovation than the ones with weak patent protection. When you think about it, it is fair for an investor to expect for their research costs to have a fair lead on the market in order to be able to expect to get their money back, and then some additional profits. These additional profits are then re-used by the investors to backfill the losses in other ventures that do not pan out, and to be re-inve
Re: (Score:3)
Does history support that though? Time and time again through history, as long as the modern patent regime has been a thing, we've seen technology stifled and forced to wait twenty years due to patents. Consider aviation, for example. The Wright brothers patent suppressed aviation right up to WWI, at which point military aviation ignored the patents. Oil companies used patents for decades to suppress solar power. Phillip Morris used patents to suppress filtered cigarettes initially because safety features f
Re:Should be thrown out (Score:4, Informative)
I hate patent trolls and accelerated erasure coding is obvious technology as it's a simple iteration on previous algorithms and required more patent paper pushing than innovation. So I disagree with this verdict.
Patent system reform. (Score:2)
The Patent System needs a Huge Reform.
Or simply, deletion of the whole scam scheme.
It brings no added value to society today.
Waco, Texas (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Time to toss software patents. They protect far more trolls and sleazebags than legitimately good ideas.
ChatGPT: obvious in light of the prior art? (Score:5, Insightful)
Response: To create an error-correcting memory system using Galois Field arithmetic, we can employ the Reed-Solomon error correction code. Here is a basic Python script demonstrating the implementation:
:
:
Can we start using ChatGPT that an "invention" is obvious in light of prior art?
How is this a victory for small patent holders? (Score:3)
He didn't sell, he is the patent troll (Score:5, Informative)
Anderson owns StreamScale [streamscale.com]. He just got himself on paper a $240M payday for patents [justia.com] that he claims cover CDH even though the core Hadoop tech in CDH predates his filings with the USPTO by about 5-7 years.
AFAICT, he is claiming that HDFS violates his patents, which would be news to Google since HDFS was based on a white paper that Google published in 2003. AFAIK, there was nothing like HDFS in the wild outside of Google until Yahoo created their own clone based off of Google's proprietary work that started probably in the late 90s.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, don't get me wrong, we all know better than any patent examiner, certainly better than any full-trial jury member that has heard the full technical arguments from both sides, and definitely better than a judge that has spent his career handling patent litigation.
Oh, right- I forget when we don't like the outcome, it's because the judge
Re:He didn't sell, he is the patent troll (Score:5, Insightful)
A judge who has spent his career handling patent litigation... badly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The letter criticized Albright for having "openly solicited cases at lawyers' meetings" and for having "repeatedly ignored binding case law and abused his discretion," noting that Albright's decisions "resulted in a flood of mandamus petitions" being filed and granted "no fewer than 15 times in just the past two years."
Judge Albright is well known for siding with patent trolls. So much so that, at one point, roughly 20% of all patent cases filed in the US were filed in his district.
Intel's lawsuit a SLAPP (Score:1)