Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model.
It's been few years now since any not-depressing news came out from Yahoo.
There can be no more doubt that Lodsys sent out vast numbers of patent assertion letters, but some of the recipients fight back and ensure they sue Lodsys before Lodsys sues them.
Since Lodsys seems to be a classic patent troll, it would be interesting to see successful lawsuits against it. Maybe that would scary away other abusers.
Now, some company called VS Technologies is suing Twitter, alleging that it infringes on a patent of theirs, entitled “Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people”. For real? For real.
It's weird that nobody has patented “famous people” so far.
In my last article, I mentioned that a patent from Gosling was one of seven cited in Oracle’s lawsuit. These patents are among those that Oracle acquired when they bought Sun earlier this year. James isn’t saying where these entries rated on the “goofy patent” scale, if at all. But another former Sun employee, Charles Nutter, has written a more detailed analysis. When considering whether or not the suit has merit, he states:
The collection of patents specified by the suit seems pretty laughable to me.
In other words, Oracle just wanted to exploit these Java patents, regardless of their actual merit.
All that we know about what Oracle wants, realistically, is what they are prepared to surrender. Aside from bearing the hard costs of litigation, Oracle is willing to absorb soft costs in risk to reputation and participation rates in the Java ecosystem. We must expect then that Oracle’s expected return will be commensurate with these costs. Oracle is many things, but stupid generally isn’t one of them.
In-depth analysis of Oracle's recent legal action against Google.
Oracle Corp. filed a lawsuit against Google Inc. on Thursday, alleging that the Internet search giant has infringed on intellectual property related to the Java software that Oracle acquired when it purchased Sun Microsystems Inc.
Oracle clearly seems to be determined to kill Java in a long run, but will try to squeeze as much cash out of it as possible.
All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.
Sent from my iPad
A letter to Steve Jobs on H.264 with a reply.
