Living in an imperfect world
by T. Colin Dodd
Red Hat News | Patent Lawsuits and Settlements
Since the settlement of the Firestar lawsuit last month, we’ve been asked to explain why Red Hat settled the case, rather than fighting to invalidate the patent at issue in the lawsuit. The news some days back that the Patent Office had issued an initial, non-final action rejecting the claims in a re-examination of the same patent has inspired similar questions. Here are our thoughts.
The patent asserted in the Firestar lawsuit was U.S. Patent No. 6,101,502. In a perfect world, this patent and others like it would not even be awarded. In an almost-perfect world, even if such patents were awarded, there would be a fair opportunity to challenge their validity. Unfortunately, that is not the world we currently live in with respect to U.S. patent law.
August 7th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
The thing is, the US patent office (and other countries too) just seem to hand out patents willy-nilly these days with very little thought, technical input or analysis.
Its very much left to us as individuals to disprove them in the real world.
For my part, backing down on such patents and paying them out really only exascerbates the problem and encourages further bad patent behaviour. Ultimately this makes it harder for everyone else.
If your sure the patent can be anulled, then getting costs awarded is the natural progression.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Since you give us no details as to how your decision was made, I surmise: there is imperfection in the world, therefore we do not seek justice. That attitude only compounds the problem.
August 18th, 2008 at 7:53 am
I suspect that the truth is that so many people are just *worn-down* by the constant antagonism to open source.