Red Hat calls for US patent law review
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Enterprise open source software vendor petitions Supreme Court saying patents have “seriously encumbered innovation in the software industry”
Commercial open source software vendor Red Hat has written to the US Supreme Court, calling for a review of software patent law.
The company argues that current laws allow organisations to patent code that other programmers might easily develop independently. This means that programmers developing new code run a significant risk of unintentionally infringing software patents, it says, thereby constraining innovation.
“Because the boundaries of software patents are exceedingly vague and the numbers of issued software patents is now enormous,” Red Hat’s briefing to the Supreme Court reads, “it is virtually impossible to rule out the possibility that a new software product may arguably infringe some patent.”
“Only those with an unusually high tolerance for risk will participate in such a market,” it adds.
Red Hat is of course talking from experience, having suffered numerous infringement suits in recent years, many of which relate to JBoss, the Java-based open source application server software.
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In 2006, little-known software company Firestar claimed that a component of JBoss infringed a patent it held for a “method of interfacing object-oriented software applications and relational databases”. Red Hat reached a settled with FireStar two years later, the financial terms of which were not disclosed. Shortly after, the Patent Office rejected FireStar’s claim after Java-creator Sun Microsystems conducted its own analysis of the code.
Earlier this year, Red Hat was served with a similar suit from a company called Software Tree. That dispute has yet to be settled.
In other patent news, a US court this week overturned a ruling ordering Microsoft to pay $388 million in damages to a company called Uniloc, which alleged that the software giant’s product activation system infringed upon a patent of its own.
Still looming over Microsoft is the claim by Canadian company i4i that the latest version of its word processing software infringes upon patents relating to the creation of XML documents.
