Total victory for open source software in a patent lawsuit

“The jury verdict last Friday in favor of Red Hat and Novell in
a case based on bad software patents owned by “non-practicing
entities” is an important victory for the open source community.
Those in the business of acquiring bad software patents to coerce
payments or bring lawsuits should be worried. Two such businesses
were plaintiffs in our case, and they did their best to confuse the
jury in one of their favorite locales, eastern Texas. But it didn’t
work. The jury unanimously found that the patents were not
infringed, and, even worse for the plaintiffs, that the patents
were invalid.

“The case was about allegations by IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a
subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), along with Technology Licensing
Corporation that Red Hat and Novell infringed four claims from U.S.
Patents 5,072,412, 5,394,521, and 5,533,183. The patents share a
common disclosure and are all titled titled “User interface with
multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects.” The
patents relate to a computer-implemented system and method for
providing a graphical user interface with multiple workspaces.”

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