Sun claims IP victory over defunct US 'counterfeiter'

Sun Micro claimed a brace of IP victories today, with a counterfeiter in the US and a UK-based grey marketeer feeling the wrath of the soon-to-be-borged firm. The Java vendor said that it had secured a federal court judgment against a man it claimed was producing counterfeit versions of its products. The order compels Joe …

[Kevin Hutchinson]

News?

News? Someone copies Sun kit, and someone else imports it from the US before reselling it? I miss the days when Sun was interesting. Jini, JXTA, Java, Niagara, etc. It seems that Google took those old words "the network is the computer" and made it happen while Sun remembered the days of big Purple boxes. Sad to see Sun not offer any network services, and certainly nothing close to Amazon's AWS.

[Inachu]

I am confused.

Ok so if hardware is sold and people do not like to deal with sun and prefer to have their hardware repaired by some third party because of faster and or better service?

If there was no software piracy and this was mainly just about hardware then

this really should go to court.

So if I buy a pc from BestBuy does not mean I must or feel compelled to bring the pc to BestBuy for repairs. Hardware that no longer has warranties or old voided lic agreements should take their hardware anywhere they want to.

I would love the details on this report.

[Anonymous Coward]

counterfeiting, not repair

> I am confused. →

Yep, you are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Archane EU Copyright trade laws

At first glance, it's hard to feel bad for M-Tech when they broke an international trade law (and I certainly don't feel bad for the SVTR guy for his actions), but the copyright law that M-Tech did break is archane and it's also unfair competition that Sun provides no provenance information outside of it's channel.

These EU copyright trade laws were created under the banner of consumer protection, but that was eons ago when products intended for other regions were made of a lower quality and included essential manuals written in a foreign language. Sun Microsystems (hopefully) doesn't make a lower quality server for use in Australia than the one it manufactures for use in the UK and manuals in your language can be downloaded anywhere.

To complicate matters, Sun won't share provenance details (details of which region the serial numbers were intended for when first put on the market) outside of their channel. Their authorized dealers may have access to this info, but not open market resellers (authorized dealers are not allowed to sell used). A reseller trading used Sun in the EU has no idea where their products originated from, so essentially this could put an entire industry (secondhand IT resellers) out of business.

Re-use of IT products spends much less energy (even on less efficient systems) by far than the recycling process uses to process the materials of that item AND also less energy than it takes to manufacture a new system. We should be promoting companies that allow products to be re-used while saving businesses money, rather than turning these resellers into criminals when they have no way to find out the "intended" region their products were meant for.

Sun is the main manufacturer litigating these cases right now, but rumors are that Cisco is getting ready to follow and other manufacturers like Dell, HP and IBM can't be far behind.

The EU needs to get with the 21st century and loosen these copyright laws to allow free imports of products intended for other markets.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least someone...

At least *someone* still knows how to make money selling Sun gear.