Texas jury finds Google infringes a patent: $5,000,000 damage award

A patent for searching a linked list? This is disgusting.<p>As a middle finger, here's me infringing on it.<p><pre><code> typedef struct node { struct node *next; void *data; } node_t; void *find(node_t *head, void *what, int (*cmp)(void *, void *)) { while(*head != NULL &#38;&#38; cmp(head-&#62;data, what) != 0) { head = head-&#62;next; } return head; } </code></pre> Of course, there is an age old infringer on this patent:<p><pre><code> (define (find ll what) (if (or (null? ll) (eq? (car ll) what)) ll (find (cdr ll) what)))</code></pre>

The title here on Hacker News has been mangled to be incomprehensible or just wrong. This is not a "Linux patent", it is a software patent which is potentially infringed by the Linux kernel.

This is one of the disadvantages of open-source software: the patent trolls can easily find places that are violating their bullshit patents. I'm sure Microsoft and Apple also use linked lists, but they're not being sued, because it's harder to prove.

I'm not seeing which part of the Linux kernel is afflicted, but this exhibit from an Amazon case at least suggests that it is for the route cache.<p><a href="http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/txedce/6:2009cv00269/116887/579/5.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/t...</a><p>If so, it should be easy to excise from future kernels with minimal performance impact. (I was suspecting filesystem entry caches, but that doesn't show up when I google.)<p>In a perfect world the patent would not have been issued since it is obvious to anyone skilled in the art that considers when to purge expired entries from a hash table with linked list overflow, especially in a world where systems are constrained by memory access times more than computation. But we are not legislated by that world.

I hate reading patents because I always feel like they try to make it look as complicated as possible. In particular, I always find the inclusion of the computer architecture somewhat useless. Do we really care that there might be 25 software applications running on your computer? Is there any reason other than overcomplication (and thus making the patent appear more novel) to include this stuff?<p>Because of this, I just want to make sure I understand the patent properly:<p>From what I can tell, its a patent on a hash table that resolves collisions using chaining, implemented using linked lists. On top of this, each entry has an expiration time and it can remove them as it does lookups for entries.

I did a quick read of the patent, 5,893,120 filed in 1997. It seems likely to me to be invalid over the prior art.

The award is peanuts for Google. But establishes a scary precedent. Basically everyone had get ready to give this company effectively a license fee for past shipments of Linux-based products.

What is the problem with that east Texas district?

What a perfectly ridiculous patent.

I think that Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership, which was argued before the Supreme Court on April 18, may change how this plays out in the end.<p>"Since 1983, the courts have followed a clear, firm rule: In order to overcome the statutory presumption that a patent is valid, a litigant must provide clear and convincing evidence that a patent is invalid. That's a high hurdle to overcome. ... Many observers expect the Supreme Court will reject the current bright-line rule and, at least under some circumstances, make it easier for parties to attack the validity of patents." - <a href="http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/court_may_make_it_easier_to_invalidate_an_invention/" rel="nofollow">http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/court_may_make_it...</a><p>Previously on HN: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453895" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2453895</a> and <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464698" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464698</a>

Here is a link to the full text of the patent in question: <a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&#38;Sect2=HITOFF&#38;d=PALL&#38;p=1&#38;u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&#38;r=1&#38;f=G&#38;l=50&#38;s1=5,893,120.PN.&#38;OS=PN/5,893,120&#38;RS=PN/5,893,120" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&#38;Sec...</a>

So here we go again. Last time there was a highly voted fosspatents article here it was completely bogus. And everyone chimed in about how this guy had ulterior motives:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355056" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355056</a>

Misleading title, dubious blog. This is an anti-Google/Android blogger with likely ties to Google competitors.<p><a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428188" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2428188</a>

are we actually sure of what is being reported??... he has miss-reported before