This is from a couple weeks back. However, I thought this was interesting to throw out there. A company called “IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp.” claims to own a patent 5,072,412 which was filed in 1991. Using this claim they have filed suit against Red Hat and Novell. According to the patent it was filed for Xerox. Did Xerox release this to IP Innovation?
From InfoWorld:
Red Hat and Novell are accused of infringing on the patents by selling the Red Hat Linux system, the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, according to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division.
The plaintiffs also contend that the defendants are deliberately and willfully infringing on the patents because they were previously notified of the infringement.
IP Innovation in Northbrook, Ill., and Technology Licensing are seeking an injunction from the court, damages, and “other relief that the court or a jury may deem just and proper,” according to the lawsuit.
IP Innovation is a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies Group.
Now from the patent 5,072,412:
Workspaces provided by an object-based user interface appear to share windows and other display objects. Each workspace’s data structure includes, for each window in that workspace, a linking data structure called a placement which links to the display system object which provides that window, which may be a display system object in a preexisting window system. The placement also contains display characteristics of the window when displayed in that workspace, such as position and size. Therefore, a display system object can be linked to several workspaces by a placement in each of the workspaces’ data structures, and the window it provides to each of those workspaces can have unique display characteristics, yet appear to the user to be the same window or versions of the same window. As a result, the workspaces appear to be sharing a window. Workspaces can also appear to share a window if each workspace’s data structure includes data linking to another workspace with a placement…
OK, so are they going to go after Apple as well?
Now, going back to the little nugget from the beginning of this post I may be mistaken but, aren’t patents only valid for 17 years? Oh wait…it has only been 16 [EDIT] Ah, it appears to be 20 years. A money grab…big shock.
Ugh.
Tags: Patent Nonsense, Patent Fight, Software Patents
