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Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

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Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#131

Post by schmichael »

noonespecial wrote: post #115

11. Venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391 and1400(b). PersonalWeb is a limited liability company incorporated in Smith County, Texaswith its principal place of business in Tyler, Texas. A substantial part of the events giving riseto the asserted claims occurred in this judicial district, Defendant transact business in this judicial district, and the patents were infringed in this ju…

Not a fan of net neutrality I take it?

As much as I hate patent trolling, I'd hate politics and ridiculous laws to restrict the free flow of information more instead of less.

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#133

Post by jeffreybaird »

jeffreybaird wrote: post #132

In an interesting addition it looks like Personal Web Technologies was recently involved in an acquisition that resulted in these patents changing hands. http://www.personalweb.com/media/20110928_PressRelease_Perso...

Part I found most interesting:

"PersonalWeb has been working closely with the University of Texas at Tyler and other community participants to develop products in the search, social network and content filtering technologies.

BDE CEO Kevin Bermeister said, “We are excited by this next phase in the business and are looking forward to working with PersonalWeb to pursue development, licensing and participation in businesses that use our patents for content addressable storage, cloud computing, search, social networking and other important developing technologies in the rapidly growing distributed computing category.”

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#134

Post by ktizo »

astrodust wrote: post #127
ktizo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs? Well the obvious answer would be through some form of tax based scheme that then plows the money into research primarily based on clinical need, which funnily enough is how a hell of a lot of the drugs that are actually useful get developed currently. But expanding these kind of solution…

A lot of these arguments skip the obvious fact that the FDA could provide its own form of commercial exclusivity without needing patents at all. You can't sell medication without FDA approval. Right now patents don't factor in to it, but if patents were eliminated the FDA could implement a similar scheme exclusively for medication.

I also suspect that the high cost of FDA approval is not treated as a negative by many in the medical industry, as it provides a nice high barrier to entry which helps reduce competition. This seems to be especially true of some of the producers of medical devices.

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#135

Post by beagle3 »

noonespecial wrote: post #115

11. Venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391 and1400(b). PersonalWeb is a limited liability company incorporated in Smith County, Texaswith its principal place of business in Tyler, Texas. A substantial part of the events giving riseto the asserted claims occurred in this judicial district, Defendant transact business in this judicial district, and the patents were infringed in this ju…

Sounds like a great idea to me. Political activism that may actually work!

But is it legal? I know it is not legal to refuse serving based on e.g. skin color, race or gender. And it's legal for a US company to refuse business with Canadians.

But is it legal for e.g. a California company to refuse to treat East Texas, or the whole of Texas, equal to North Carolina?

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#137

Post by rossjudson »

rbanffy wrote: post #98
mikey_p wrote: post #18

Some of these seem really questionable at first glance (note that I haven't read the entire patents yet) > United States Patent No. 6,415,280 "Identifying and Requesting Data in Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data." This sounds alot like hashing the contents of a file to get and identifier for it. If anything it sounds like maybe Git itself violates this, but I thought that Git hashed the di…

> This sounds alot like hashing the contents of a file to get and identifier for it Oops... I think the image asset deduplication method I used at the portal I worked for infringes on that. It's a Brazilian company, so, good luck for them. Yep... They still use it: http://i0.ig.com/bancodeimagens/02/9a/e2/029ae2zxd9u8jflt2le...

Document and image management systems have been doing this sort of thing for decades. Form a unique identifier for an image by hashing, split the bytes out into a path name by hex converting, and you have a file system path.

I'd say that this particular troll is going to get stepped on pretty hard, and all of these patents are going to be invalidated.

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#138

Post by Natsu »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #121
noonespecial wrote: post #115

11. Venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391 and1400(b). PersonalWeb is a limited liability company incorporated in Smith County, Texaswith its principal place of business in Tyler, Texas. A substantial part of the events giving riseto the asserted claims occurred in this judicial district, Defendant transact business in this judicial district, and the patents were infringed in this ju…

Apparently the win rates in EDT aren't that great any more. Someone posted a link to this effect a few lawsuits ago. The reason why people still file there is because the judges all now have good working knowledge of patent law and that makes trials fairly efficient. Dunno if this is actually true, but.

That ignores the selection effects. Once word of their reputation got out, people started settling the weaker cases rather than litigating in East Texas.

They also have helpful local rules, like the one that lets people file a cover sheet with the clerk a day early, getting a case number and priority. So even if you anticipate the lawsuit, you can't get out of EDT, as Cisco found out once upon a time.

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#139

Post by rapind »

maratd wrote: post #87
jethroalias97 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, restrictions and bureaucracy tend to just favor lawyers who can charge higher to dig through it.

Things are already complex enough to the point where even a very good lawyer barely grasps how things work. The latest example is the Redhat scenario. They hit Redhat, Redhat swings pack with a GPL violation. I guarantee you that the GPL never came up in conversation when they were considering suing Redhat. We just need to make things even more complex until lawyers absolutely cannot predict the outcome of litigation…

Complexity is an advantage for the existing elite. The more complex you make patent law, the harder it will be to defend against if you're a small fish with limited resources.

IMO complexity through abstraction enables most of the evil in the world.

Re: Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

#140

Post by carbocation »

schmichael wrote: post #131
noonespecial wrote: post #115

11. Venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391 and1400(b). PersonalWeb is a limited liability company incorporated in Smith County, Texaswith its principal place of business in Tyler, Texas. A substantial part of the events giving riseto the asserted claims occurred in this judicial district, Defendant transact business in this judicial district, and the patents were infringed in this ju…

Not a fan of net neutrality I take it? As much as I hate patent trolling, I'd hate politics and ridiculous laws to restrict the free flow of information more instead of less.

Noonespecial is talking about private actors, not the state. This is essentially a call for a boycott, and I can't see this as a reflection on noonespecial's views on net neutrality one way or the other.
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