GNOME Foundation about the actions taken to protect against , put forward by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, activities . Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for purchasing a license to use the patent from Shotwell. The license amount is expressed in a five-digit number. Despite the fact that purchasing a license would be the easiest way out, and legal proceedings would require a lot of expense and hassle, the GNOME Foundation decided not to agree to the deal and fight to the end.
Consent would jeopardize other open source projects that could potentially fall prey to said patent troll. As long as the patent used in the lawsuits, covering obvious and widely used image manipulation techniques, remains in effect, it can be used as a weapon to carry out other attacks. To finance the defense of GNOME in court and to carry out work to invalidate the patent (for example, by proving facts of earlier use of the technologies described in the patent), a special fund βΒ«.
A company has been hired to protect the GNOME Foundation , which has already sent three documents to the court:
- Motion for complete dismissal of the case. The defense believes that the patent involved in the case is insolvent, and the technologies described in it are not applicable to the protection of intellectual property in software;
- A response to a lawsuit questioning whether GNOME should be a defendant in such lawsuits. The document attempts to prove that the patent specified in the lawsuit cannot be used to make claims against Shotwell and any other free software.
- A counterclaim that will prevent Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC from retreating and choosing a less obstinate victim to attack when it realizes the seriousness of GNOME's intention to fight for invalidation of the patent.
Recall that the GNOME Foundation patent infringement in Shotwell Photo Manager. The patent is dated 2008 and describes a technique for wirelessly connecting an image capture device (phone, web camera) to an image receiving device (computer) and then selectively transmitting images filtered by date, location and other parameters. According to the plaintiff, for patent infringement it is enough to have an import function from a camera, the ability to group images according to certain characteristics and send images to external sites (for example, a social network or photo service).
Source: opennet.ru