11.16.07
Patent Roundup: Acacia’s Trolling Suffers Prior Art Barriers
TrollTracker has some new interesting bits about Acacia, the patent troll that attacks Linux (and has roots in Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]).
Reader Anthony Sabatini of New York writes to tell me that the auto-text patent asserted by Acacia subsidiary AutoText in Cleveland might be invalid in light of the Control Data Corp CDC6600 console system developed two decades earlier.
[…]
Finally, IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. — in other words, ACACIA — filed a lawsuit in Marshall against Google, accusing Google’s search engine and Google Earth of infringing two patents. This is the same Acacia sub that sued Red Hat and Novell over Linux, with the same lawyers - Johnny Ward and Eric Albritton. But these are different patents. The patents asserted against Google are 5,276,785 and 5,675,819, which Acacia got from Xerox. Nice going, Xerox.
You see? So, companies inherit the patents of companies that actually have products and then absorb the bad image on their behalf. They can also do their fights, by proxy. Haven’t we all learned that from SCO?
In other patent news, Vonage gets another round of confrontation.
A federal appeals court on Thursday turned down a request by Vonage Holdings to reconsider a lower court verdict that it infringed two patents held by Verizon Communications.
One of the readers found some very interesting bits to add:
One is an example of patent licensing abuse.
Qualcomm Wednesday won one of its many battles with Nokia over patents and related licensing fees
[…].
A cross-licensing agreement expired in April, and Nokia has halted payments to cover its use of Qualcomm’s technology for high-speed
mobile data
Here is an ultra trivial patent.
A system and method for printing a customized combination newsletter and product label for used in dispensing prescribed pharmaceutical products
The patent system never produced so much innovation.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.