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Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
31–40 of 222 posts
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't seem like a few protocol fields, but about the entire mechanism of distributing the information and how to get from a request to any one server in the distributed network to the one that actually stores the information you requested (at least looking at the claims in your first patent). I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000…
I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings. The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference. None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they i…
Why do we cling to this idea of patent trolls?
The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult.
Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does.
Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters.
The reality is, software patents are a joke and should be dropped entirely. Copyright is enough protection for most use cases.
Aka, don't hate the player, hate the game. And ideally, do something to fix it instead of complaining about "trolls" as if that'll ever fix the issue.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#33Earlier 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…
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Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings. The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference. None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they i…
Why do we cling to this idea of patent trolls? The patent system is the problem. None of this should have been granted but when you really try to define what software patents are novel it becomes incredibly difficult. Just because you think this is trivial does not mean a layperson does. Is an encryption algo novel? What's novel about it, it's just a hashing function with some new parameters. The reality is, software…
IANAL but the route to resolve this seems to be to challenge the patent on the grounds it should never have been granted and have it overturned, which it looks very much like it would be an easy argument to make, if not easy to achieve in practice.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#35The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia.
It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it.
The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#36Earlier 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?
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Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't seem like a few protocol fields, but about the entire mechanism of distributing the information and how to get from a request to any one server in the distributed network to the one that actually stores the information you requested (at least looking at the claims in your first patent). I have no idea if there was prior art or how close the procedure they describe was to known storage algorithms in 2000…
I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings. The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference. None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they i…
> None of this sounds novel
None of these sounds novel now.
It was much more back in 2000.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#38The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
The first patent was issued in the 1400's — it is exactly how humans have progressed technologically and sociality. Let's stop being so absolutist about these topics.
The problem here isn't that patents exist, intellectual property protection is critical to investment and research. The issue here is two fold:
1. Patents usually involve a lot of research — and existed as a way to ensure that competition couldn't imitate your product without also making that investment, licensing it from you, etc. If there was no protection, they would immediately undercut you since they don't have investment costs to cover. Tech patents, however, are so broad and require so little actual material science that the "protect the investment" part doesn't add up.
2. Patent offices couldn't keep up with the rapid rate of technical advancement and may have granted overly-broad patents for what we would now consider rather general topics. The only effective way to invalidate these patents is expensive and lengthy court proceedings — which is fair, if you think about it, you wouldn't want your rights taken away without a defence. But when weaponised, it can count-intuitively stifle the innovation it was trying to protect.
What we need is a better criteria and definition of IP which better suits modern industry.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#39The concept of intellectual property is antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia. It's a wasteful aberration that strangles innovation with red tape and hands control of our culture over to those with the financial mean to claim to own it. The day we wrest back that control will be a good day.
> antithetical to how humans have progressed socially and technologically for millenia
I'd argue the opposite. It has been one of the primary driving forces behind human progress for the past 300-400 years. The world today would be a much bleaker and more miserable place if IP rights never became a thing.
Imagine writing or any type of content creation without copyright. Even after the printing press was invented it was basically impossible to make a living only from writing without being independently wealthy, having some rich patron or a daytime job. Publishing any new content was risky and generally unprofitable, it would either flop or if it didn't other publishers would start printing it without giving you a dime.
Without IP rights innovating only makes sense if you're large corporation and have a moat or you're funded by someone else (state/universities/etc.). For any small to medium business it would mean that you would incur all of the costs and couldn't compete with others which would steal your tech as soon as it becomes public.
Of course there is a point where it might start stifling innovation and we might be already past it but that's a bit like calling for air travel to be banned because of the whole Boeing debacle etc.
Re: Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped after claim 9 on the first patent linked. It had, up until that point, described: peer-to-peer routing, downloading data and programs, running downloaded programs using downloaded data, redirection, and variable length strings. The next of claims seemed to begin to regurgitate the previous ones with some indiscerbable minute difference. None of this sounds novel. I read another of their patents where they i…
Another poster I think put it better: what the patent is describing is essentially building a DNS system for data. Claim 1 describes how DNS forwarders work (the "client" is a DNS client, the "server" is a DNS forwarder, and the "data location server" is a DNS authoritative name server). Claim 10 then describes how a DNS recursive resolver works (the "client" is the rescursive resolver, and the "data location servers…
IANAL but there was a patent describing a USB-powered vibrator.
While the idea of a vibrator is not new, and the idea of powering devices via USB isn't new either, the combination of these two non-new ideas was new.
The patent was granted, and when someone (not the patent holder) produced a USB-powered vibrator, they were found in a violation of the patent in question.
Similarly, if someone made a patent about "building a DNS system for data", and someone else used that idea to actually build that system, they may be in a violation of the patent. The more claims (or sub-claims) there are, the more specific the innovation was, and now the question is whether the supposed infringement was actually implementing all of the claims of the patent.