A jury in Rochester, N.Y., found Sun Microsystems liable
for using patented technology owned by photography company Eastman Kodak
in the Java programming language.
The Friday verdict at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of
New York ruled Sun had violated all counts in the patent infringement case.
Tuesday, the jury will decide how much to penalize the company. Kodak is
asking for $1.6 billion in damages.
Officials at the Rochester-based company were pleased with the ruling,
calling the verdict a win for intellectual property (IP) rights.
“Kodak has and continues to make substantial technology investments to
ensure high-quality products,” a statement by the company stated. “We are
pleased that the court has validated Kodak’s [IP] rights protecting these
valuable innovations for the benefit of our customers and shareholders.”
Officials at Sun were not available for comment at press time.
According to Jim Blamphin, a spokesperson at Kodak, the case centers on
three patents currently on file at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office
(USPTO) — #5,226,161, #5,206,951 and #5,421,012 — that were originally owned by
Wang Laboratories, which Kodak acquired in 1997.
The three patents, filed between April 1991 and May 1993, focus on object
managers that handle the communications between two or more applications to
identify each other and the data formats the two applications have in
common.
Kodak’s lawsuit maintains Sun violated a Technology License and Distribution
Agreement (TLDA) signed by the companies in September 1996 by
distributing and using Java’s Remote Method Invocation (RMI), Interface
Definition Language (IDL) and Java Applet Environment (JAE), which touch on
the three patents.
According to court documents, however, Sun maintains Kodak has received
periodic updates to the Java language and must have seen RMI, IDL and JAE at
least once in that period of time.
Lawyers for the Santa Clara, Calif., software company will likely point that
out during the damage assessment phase of the trial. A trial brief, along
with a proposed jury charge on damages and an expert witness list, is due in
Judge Michael Telesca’s office by the end of the day.
The ramifications of the ruling are significant, said Steve O’Grady of
research outfit Red Monk, and will likely prompt other companies to go
through their own patents in search of a big payoff. Kodak’s case, he said,
is just a continuation of lawsuits like the $5 billion case
against IBM filed by the SCO Group
, where financially-distressed companies look for revenue help
by seeking redress in the courts for patent infringement.
“Essentially, patent litigation is what’s being viewed as an additional
revenue source, so I would imagine a lot of firms out there beyond Kodak are
combing through their respective patent libraries and assets, looking for
opportunities for lawsuits just like this,” O’Grady said. “It speaks to the
problems that I see are inherent in patenting software.”
While O’Grady hasn’t studied the patents in depth, he said the ruling could
pave the way for other development platforms, including the popular .NET
platform owned by software giant Microsoft .
“From all the reports I’ve seen [the patents] talk about when an application
‘calls for help’ and that’s very applicable to a number of other
technologies — .NET I would say being first and foremost,” he said.
Microsoft officials declined to comment. Blamphin
would not comment on any topics outside the scope of the pending case.
