AWS must fork out $30.5M after losing P2P network patent scrap A Delaware jury has determined that Amazon Web Services infringed two networking patents and now owes the current patent holder $30.5 million. The jury returned its decision [PDF] on Friday, finding that AWS' CloudFront content delivery network ripped off two 2000-era patents (US 6714966 and 6732147) originally developed by …
It's always difficult to tell what's specifically novel about a patent because they're written in such obscure language and also depend on the cumulative result of a series of claims.
I'm struggling to discern what's here that wasn't part of the IS-IS routing protocol which started life at the end of the last century and was not then considered to be novel technology - except that perhaps it overlays an existing network and there is selective participation. IS-IS used a mechanism of point-to-point neighbour links to distribute a link-state routing database around a network.
The patents appear to claim variants of gossip networking, which is a topic exhaustively researched and published well before 2000. Including variants with various special network rules found in the patent claims. The year 2000 was not the dawn of knowledge, networking was a deep topic decades before that.
Sending the same message to every node for just one to get through is a very pathetic way to use a network and back when links were slower they resulted in broadcast storms which wiped out wide area networks.
Most network programmers/designers moved away from this style of behaviour, but obviously there were a few over in the states who didn't actually understand what they were programming, as evidenced by the network behaviour of such as Novell, Microsoft, Cisco.
That probably accounts for these ridiculous late US patents that cover IT stuff we did in the 70s.
Does this sort of thing only affect American companies?
Software patents are not valid in Europe, right? So if I want to start a software business, do it in a Europe, and then can’t be sued for a patent titled: “System and Technique for Diagnostic Evaluation and Network Recovery Through Controlled Power Availability and Interruption”… otherwise known as Turning it off and On again…
Does anybody really feel bad for poor old Amazon?! Really, Amazon?! (This is probably the only infringer with the kind of deep pockets the owner could go after.)
Would it matter if the owner of the patent was the original inventor of the technology and the Jeff Bezos crew screwed the inventor over (deliberate infringement)? Would people still be feeling bad for poor old Amazon?
"Does anybody really feel bad for poor old Amazon?! Really, Amazon?!"
Sure, the hated megatat bazaar was the target this time, but bullshit is bullshit.
"Would people still be feeling bad for poor old Amazon?"
The entire premise of the second paragraph is irrelevant as it's a lousy attempt at a strawman appeal to emotions. I'm sure Amazon have screwed people over (cough Kindle cough) but that's not what happened here so any such whatifery is you desperately trying to support a failed argument.
I care little about Amazon beyond "where's my parcel?", but really, fuck trolls.
We all lose when this kind of thing goes on - innovation is stifled and the addition of a hefty ' infringemnet tax' (or 'potential infringeent tax' due to process that needs to be put in place to try and limit the risk) on products and services ultimately hurts the consumer.
In any case the original patent owner (Boeing) did allow Amazon to use it - so Amazon seems to be absolved from any kind of hypotetical 'screwing over the little guy' claims.
Regardless of public opinion, large corporations go to enormous lengths to avoid this kind of thing , and generally act correctly and within the law. But they are also massive bureaucracies - even where policies and processes are put in place making sure everyone is aware, and undertstands how to comply, and realises that it applies to their little obscure bit of the business is amazingly hard.
Without getting into details of the actual patents and how they were, or were not being applied in this case, I just sit back and laugh at the very fact this is allowed to go on in the US.
I don't know what timeline they have for expiration of patents in the US, but some of these patents really need to expire and aren't worth the paper they're printed on, so to speak, however, as long as these patents keep generating huge sums of money on payout then you're going to have these trolls buying up patents left, right and centre.
I've posted on this before, if you've invented something significant, (not just applied existing tech in a different way), then I think you absolutely have the undisputable right to benefit from this.
It's allowed to go on in the US because a large percentage of the judiciary are anti-corporate, anti-capitalist, Marxist shitheads!
Plus, juries will always side against the "big evil corporation"! The bloodsucking lawyers know this!
I tend to agree with the Bard, "Kill all the lawyers!"*
(* Yes, I know that quote is out of context, but I still like it!)
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Yeah, in the case of non-software patents (things that can be made), then inventing it yourself doesn't mean someone else didn't invent it first then patent it. Even if you invent it first, the only defence against someone else patenting it later is to either:
1. Patent it yourself, or
2. Publish a paper describing your invention
In most of the world the system works quite well: patents get examined properly and are granted for 20 years when something is inventive. The problems in the US are:
1. They allow software patents
2. They tend to grant dubious patents and leave it to later litigation to determine the patentability
3. If you lose in the later litigation you're subject to the infamous triple damages
4. There are patent troll friendly areas, and it's very difficult to get verdicts overturned by higher courts (hence when NetApp, CA based, sued Sun Microsystems, CA based, the suit was filed in East Texas)
"They took a wired device they invented and rejigged for fibre."
The problem is that it's far too easy to get patents for XYZ existing process "but on a computer" or "but using fibre"
This is related to the USPTO actively discouraging patent examiners from doing more than a cursory look and setting them quotas for patents issued per week
If a monopolist prevents market entry by smaller players, selling your patents to a troll might be the only way to get a little payback?
No idea if this was the case here and who originally owned the patents in question, but I am no longer in the "patent trolls are uniquely bad" camp... the giants who do do actual R&D and bring products to market will also happily use anything in their own patent portfolio in an extremely aggressive way. See: Nintendo vs. Palworld
"the giants who do do actual R&D and bring products to market"
Therein is the thing that ought to matter. Ignore who does the R&D because I don't see any problem with the little guy coming up with something and selling it to a bigger company that can actually make it...
...but there ought to be a very basic rule that states that if you own a patent for X then you ought to be making a product that relies upon X; in which case somebody ripping off X is obvious "harm" (by whatever definition of harm the lawyers come up with), but if you just own a big ring binder with all these patents in it that you intend on wielding as a weapon to extract money from others (who may even have come up with a superficially similar idea by themselves), then that's barely more than legalised extortion. In that scenario, the guys that don't actually make anything profit and we all end to paying more to cover for this nonsense.
"use anything in their own patent portfolio in an extremely aggressive way"
Do they have a choice? The system might be set up like trademarks that if they don't defend it then they risk losing it, so they'll defend it hard to avoid that. It rather implies that the system is quite broken, but I don't see the legal people of the world doing much to change this cash cow.
It looks to me like they heard about this thing called "gnutella" and went "hey, that's a good idea, let's pretend it was ours"?
(Of course there are earlier protocols that use similar techniques, so not novel for gnutella, but that is just the most well known example of something specifically using the very architecture described in the patent in the way Amazon use it, and it was literally only released a few months before they applied for these patents...)
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