Red Hat Seeks Defense Against Patent Lawsuit
In October 2007 IP Innovation filed a lawsuit against Novell and Red Hat for violation of certain virtual desktop patents. Red Hat is now asking the community for help to invalidate it.
IP Innovation LLC, a subsidiary of the California Acacia Technologies patent enforcement firm, had filed a claim in Texas court that Red Hat and Novell had violated three U.S. patents concerning a user interface with multiple workspaces. Red Hat is now seeking to counter the claim by providing proof that the technology had already been widespread at the time of the lawsuit, citing the "prior art" provision.
Red Hat has published information in its defense on the Post-Issue Peer to Patent pages of the Linux Defenders website. The patents had originated March 25, 1987, and addressed a "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects" (full details of the lawsuit from Groklaw).
In a Fedora-announce-list e-mail, Red Hat's VP and counsel Rob Tiller claims that his company has "strong defenses in this lawsuit," but nevertheless seeks input from the FOSS community "to submit prior art relevant to the patents" to "reinforce" their defense.
Issue 14: Raspberry Pi Handbook/Special Editions
Tag Cloud
News
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SCO Rises from the Swamp
Longtime litigator revives an ancient suit against IBM alleging Linux infringes on Unix copyrights.
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UberStudent Project Releases UberStudent 3.0
Specialty distro keeps the focus on advanced learning.
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openSUSE Conference Approaches
The openSUSE Conference will be held July 18-22, 2013, at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.
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Drupal.org Hacked
Security breached at home sites of the CMS project.
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Oracle Takes Action on Java Security
Lead Java developer vows policy changes and more attention to fixing problems.
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Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
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Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
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FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
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Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
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Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.