GNOME Foundation on the successful settlement of a lawsuit brought by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, which accused the project of patent infringement. The parties reached an agreement in which the plaintiff dropped all charges against GNOME and agreed not to bring any more claims related to the infringement of any patents owned by him. Moreover, Rothschild Patent Imaging has made a commitment not to bring claims against any open source projects whose code is released under an open source license approved by the OSI. The commitment covers the entire portfolio of patents held by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC. Details on the terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Recall that the GNOME Foundation patent infringement in the Shotwell photo manager. The patent is dated 2008 and describes a technique for wirelessly connecting an image capturing device (phone, webcam) to an image receiving device (computer) and then selectively transmitting images filtered by date, location, and other parameters. According to the plaintiff, to infringe the patent, it is enough to have the function of importing from the camera, the ability to group images according to certain criteria and send images to external sites (for example, to a social network or photo service).
The plaintiff offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for buying a license to use the patent, but GNOME did not agree to the deal and fight to the end, as the concession would jeopardize other open source projects that could potentially become victims of said patent troll. To fund the defense of GNOME, the GNOME Patent Troll Defense Fund was created, which over $150 out of the required $125.
Shearman & Sterling was hired to protect the GNOME Foundation from the funds raised, which filed a petition with the court for a complete dismissal of the case, since the patent in the case is invalid, and the technologies described in it are not applicable to protect intellectual property in software. The very possibility of using this patent to make claims against free software was also questioned. Finally, a counterclaim was filed to invalidate the patent.
Later to the defense the Open Invention Network (OIN), an organization dedicated to protecting the Linux ecosystem from patent claims. OIN assembled a team of lawyers to get the patent invalidated and launched an initiative to find evidence of earlier use of the technologies described in the patent (Prior art).
Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC is a classic patent troll, living mostly off lawsuits against small start-ups and companies that don't have the resources for lengthy litigation and are easier to pay compensation. Over the past 6 years, 714 such claims have been filed by this patent troll. Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC only owns the intellectual property, but does not conduct development and production activities, i.e. it cannot be sued for infringement of the terms of use of patents in any products. One can only try to prove the invalidity of the patent by proving the facts of the earlier use of the technologies described in the patent.
Source: opennet.ru