<story><title>Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit</title><url>http://opensource.com/law/10/5/total-victory-patent-lawsuit-against-open-source-software</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>Acacia has been doing this for &lt;i&gt;years&lt;/i&gt;, they have a very big warchest filled with the money from previous extortions.&lt;p&gt;They simply bit off more than they could chew, you can bet that in the future they&apos;re not going to change their game much, they will just go after smaller companies again.&lt;p&gt;I really hope that this will set precedent in the sense that a future defendant will be able to point to this suit and link this party with their previous loss, unfortunately that is not how it normally works in the courtroom.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a pity that the lawyers didn&apos;t get reprimanded for bringing this case, that would have been better still. After all, if you can get the legal profession to think twice before bringing bogus lawsuits then Acacia et al will have do a lot of homework beforehand instead of hoping that the sheer pressure of a lawsuit will cause their opponents to capitulate, as has happened so frequently in the past.&lt;p&gt;Here&apos;s a link to a previous case they lost, it doesn&apos;t seem like that deterred them much:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eff.org/files/acacia-patent-invalidated.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.eff.org/files/acacia-patent-invalidated.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;and a blog article about that:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/09/good-day-for-the-industry-federal-court-invalidates-acacia-streaming-patents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another party that should be in the docket here is the patent office, they should somehow be made liable for the cost of litigation stemming from the issuing of patents that should never have been granted in the first place.</text></comment>
<story><title>Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit</title><url>http://opensource.com/law/10/5/total-victory-patent-lawsuit-against-open-source-software</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mmelin</author><text>&quot;Plaintiffs attempted to exploit this inexperience by arguing that open source software involved behavior that was, if not downright illegal, at least ethically dubious. They promoted the fallacy that open source distributors unfairly take the property of others and thereby unfairly profit. They also suggested that Red Hat&apos;s public criticisms of the U.S. patent system as it relates to software and related calls for legal reform were un-American and indicated a secret fondness for the writings of Karl Marx.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Wow. It&apos;s like a bad movie.</text></comment>