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Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#21

Post by throwaway11460 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #17
mbreese wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not reading the patents, having a metadata server separate from the stored object data has been around for a long time. For example: IIRC, Lustre does this and was around well before the cloud (to the point where any patents that may have applied would have expired). Many HPC storage systems work with split metadata and object storage nodes, I’m just not sure how long others have been around. But, I’m sure AWS tried…

According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed. Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially…

How are you supposed to not infringe on patents that were not granted yet?

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#22

Post by tsimionescu »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #18
tsimionescu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of the claims is that they are mostly for a DNS server implemented using an object-oriented database, mapping the object tre with the DNS hierarchy and dedudcing IP at each level. The rest is just this principle as pure software or as a hardware appliance with pre-installed software, and with a GUI to control the object mappings. But the central idea seems to be the OO aspect. Edit: also, this doesn't seem…

There were three counts the jury found in favor of Kove, one for each of these patents: > as follows: (a) On Count 1 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,814,180; (b) On Count 2 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,233,978; (c) On Count 3 of plaintiff’s complaint, finding infringement by defendant of U.S. Patent No. 7,103,640. -Ve…

Interesting. Given that '180 is assigned to InfoBlox and '170 is assigned to Econnectix like the other 2 patents, I believe that '170 is more likely to be the patent they actually used in the suit, and the verdict form has a typo.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#23

Post by tsimionescu »

throwaway11460 wrote: post #21
tsimionescu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed. Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially…

How are you supposed to not infringe on patents that were not granted yet?

It's supposed to be very unlikely, unless you're actively looking for trouble. In principle, patents are supposed to only be given out for inventions that pass a bar of novelty. If that were true (it often isn't), it should ensure that it's very very unlikely for others to arrive at the same patentable invention independently. If they do, tough luck to the second person.

Still, patents become public from the moment they are filed. So you can scour the patent applications database as well if you fear others have already filed for a patent for something you are trying to do. Of course, that will mean that, if you go ahead with your own implementation and the patent is later granted, you will not be able to claim that you didn't know about this, and will face higher damages if you end up in a lawsuit.

The principle here is that a company decides to publish some internal discovery instead of keeping it for themselves, and the government in return grants them a limited time monopoly on that invention. The company could instead keep the invention a secret, but in that case, they can't stop others from using it, and if someone else patents it, their secret invention can actually infringe on the patent granted to someone else later.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#25

Post by spxneo »

patents, copyright are ridiculous concepts that no longer make sense in the age of AI and large language models

if you do not want somebody copying your idea, cutting the price and cornering the market, then you simply should not put it out in the world at all.

behind every patent litigation is the threat of violence pure and simple. violence is the building fabric of everything in the west.

the same european colonial attitudes from 15th century that everything can be divided, labelled and sold backed by violence.

skin colours, ideologies, copyright, patents are all cut from the same ilk!

so much of American concepts are echos of its European colonialism.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#26

Post by radicalbyte »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #14

Im still very undecided on software patents and have been since they were first awarded software patents in general are a bad idea imho, go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain. otoh society benefits a lot from good ideas entering the public domain, and the patent system is fairly effective at stopping everyone keeping their secret sauce a secret. Since the US has them, and this decision seems…

I've yet to see a software patent which wouldn't have been reinvented by someone else looking at the same problem. The thing with software is that the cost to experiment is extremely low compared to other fields so we can, and do, "just try it".

At this point in my career for example everything I do is basically tweaking or adapting patterns I've seen in other systems to the ones I'm working on.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#27

Post by tobyjsullivan »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #14

Im still very undecided on software patents and have been since they were first awarded software patents in general are a bad idea imho, go trade secret and never let the ideas enter the public domain. otoh society benefits a lot from good ideas entering the public domain, and the patent system is fairly effective at stopping everyone keeping their secret sauce a secret. Since the US has them, and this decision seems…

I’d be curious to hear an anecdote about a single software patent that benefited society at large.

For example, I agree it would be very interesting and arguably valuable to have a public document describing how Amazon built S3. Unfortunately, these patents don’t describe what AWS did. They describe how some random “inventor” thought a system like that could be built (more realistically, of course, that rando likely never dreamed of any valuable application like S3).

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#28

Post by irjustin »

throwaway11460 wrote: post #21
tsimionescu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, Lustre was released in 2003, while these patents were filed in 2000 and 2001 (they were only granted much later, in 2007, but the filing date is the most relevant), so that's not a good example. The patents are expired today, but they weren't in 2018 when this suit was filed. Still, even if the patents were in some way novel at their time, I think the details are far more important, especially…

How are you supposed to not infringe on patents that were not granted yet?

You have to show that you were already working on it independently which is effectively establishing prior art and you are literally it.

How do you do that? beyond my pay grade.

Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

#29

Post by formvoltron »

They say don't feed the troll haha.

But we realized if we feed the troll massive amounts of money then they can come back and pay more legal fees and create a need for our worthless court!

Also the life of the startup entrepreneur is just too easy these days. They need to feel more stress that at any moment some rando from Florida can come in crush what they've been working on the last 7 years.

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