Rackspace accused of patent infringement for hosting Github

<i>11. Venue is proper in the Eastern District of Texas under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1391 and1400(b). PersonalWeb is a limited liability company incorporated in Smith County, Texaswith its principal place of business in Tyler, Texas. A substantial part of the events giving riseto the asserted claims occurred in this judicial district, Defendant transact business in this judicial district, and the patents were infringed in this judicial district</i><p>I think maybe its time for all technology companies everywhere to boycott a certain district in East Texas. Don't ship there. Geolock all services so they aren't useable there. Hell, if Hulu can keep the Canadians out, this should be easy.<p>If nothing else, it would send a message to the people living in that area that their local courts have been hijacked to do some very unfortunate things. It would send a pretty good message to other jurisdictions as well : "make a national nuisance of yourself, lose your interwebs."<p>Want to stay out of patent court? <i>Don't mess with Texas.</i>

I can't view the link because it's expired, so I'll just post my rant here.<p>The <i>entire point</i> of patents, as delineated in the U.S. Constitution, is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So patents are a <i>means</i>, of securing an <i>end</i>, which is "the progress of science and useful arts". Is anyone actually arguing at this point that our current patent regime is accomplishing this end? Would the world be a better place if git and github did not exist, and the only entity that could use the technologies in these patents were the patent holders?

The patents in question:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US5978791" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US5978791</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US6415280" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US6415280</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US6928442" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US6928442</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7802310" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7802310</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7945539" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7945539</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7945544" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7945544</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7949662" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7949662</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US8001096" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US8001096</a><p><a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US8099420" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US8099420</a>

Rackspace isn't the only one being sued by the troll today.<p>Rackspace[1] Nexsan[2] Yahoo[3]<p>It also appears that this is the second round. (From 2011)<p>Caringo[4] NEC Corportation[5] Google[6] EMC/Vmware[7]<p>[1]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190890/PersonalWeb-Technologies-et-al-v-Rackspace-et-al" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190890/PersonalWeb-Technologies...</a> [2]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190872/PersonalWeb-Technologies-et-al-v-Nexsan-Technologies" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190872/PersonalWeb-Technologies...</a> [3]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190829/PersonalWeb-Technologies-et-al-v-Yahoo" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/106190829/PersonalWeb-Technologies...</a> [4]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/75152879/PersonalWeb-Technologies-v-Caringo" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/75152879/PersonalWeb-Technologies-...</a> [5]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/75137853/PersonalWeb-Technologies-v-NEC-Corporation-of-America" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/75137853/PersonalWeb-Technologies-...</a> [6]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/75142772/PersonalWeb-Technologies-v-Google-et-al" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/75142772/PersonalWeb-Technologies-...</a> [7]<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/75152912/PersonalWeb-Technologies-v-EMC-et-al" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/75152912/PersonalWeb-Technologies-...</a>

I'm pretty fed up with this kind of stuff so I decided to join the EFF today.

The patents were issued and the law must be enforced. You might not like it -- so change it! Reminds me of when Teddy Roosevelt vigorously enforced prohibition to the point that is really pissed people off. The point that I gleaned from this was that he wanted people to stand up and change the law.<p>I hope that patent trolls raise a stink and enforce their rights because it will <i>hopefully</i> lead to change.<p>UPDATE: see comments below.. I was incorrect in that he enforced prohibition. It was liquor sales on Sunday that he was enforcing as police commissioner in new york.

How many of these ridiculous lawsuits will it take before lawmakers realize how bad software patents are?<p>This will waste a lot of time and money for something that shouldn't even exist.

Some of these seem really questionable at first glance (note that I haven't read the entire patents yet)<p>&#62; United States Patent No. 6,415,280 "Identifying and Requesting Data in Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data."<p>This sounds alot like hashing the contents of a file to get and identifier for it. If anything it sounds like maybe Git itself violates this, but I thought that Git hashed the difference between all the changes of a commit to get the hash. Some of the others sounds equally obvious at first glance.<p>I don't really understand why they are suing Rackspace for the Github service other than the fact that it is hosted by Rackspace and it seems they are an easy target since they are based in Texas along with the plantiff putting them in the same jurisdiction.<p>It seems like some of the more generic patents related to "Controlling Access to Data in a Data Processing System," "Distributing and Accessing Data in a Data Processing System," and "Accessing Data in a Data Processing System" could apply to lots of other services and cloud providers anyway. Why not go after Amazon or someone else that does Git hosting?

Interesting that Level3 - yes, that Level3 - is a 50% owner of the patents.

They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're patent trolls:<p>"We are located in East Texas, and we are developing innovative technologies and products. We have a team who is responsible for some of the web’s most popular software and applications, and we own some really amazing patents."

"Access denied", what is going on? S3 is messed up or they pulled the page?

Access is denied. any mirrors?

Luckily I own the patent on the business model of suing for infringing overly broad software patents.<p>I want 10 billion from the folks suing Rackspace for patent infringement, for infringing my patent, of suing for patent infringement.

If only it didn't cost 10's of thousands to have patents re-examined by the Patent Office -- we could put a lot of trolls out of business and destroy a lot of nonsense patents.

In an interesting addition it looks like Personal Web Technologies was recently involved in an acquisition that resulted in these patents changing hands.<p><a href="http://www.personalweb.com/media/20110928_PressRelease_PersonalWeb.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.personalweb.com/media/20110928_PressRelease_Perso...</a>

Could anyone translate the legalese into plain English for us lay-men.

Rackspace just issued a response:<p><a href="http://www.rackspace.com/blog/patent-trolls-make-them-pay/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rackspace.com/blog/patent-trolls-make-them-pay/</a>

For a moment, based on the backtrack (amazonaws.com), I thought Amazon was suing Rackspace. It'd be nice to get that fixed.

One question, how much would it cost to buy EVERY software patent? Millions, billions?

Not a link.

sigh...