Did Microsoft send in the trolls?
(Via Open Source.)
Our own Stephen Shankland at C|Net has seen the other shoe drop on Steve Ballmer’s patent threat. (Found this cute guy at Funkydung.com.)
Two patent trolls, Technology Licensing Corp. of Nevada and IP Innovation, a unit of Acacia Technologies, have filed suit against Novell and Red Hat for alleged violations of U.S. Patent 5,072,412, which covers a “User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects.”
The patent was originally granted in 1991 to Xerox.
I call these companies patent trolls because they only exist for holding and licensing patents, rather than producing products. TLC has pictures of the patent office on its home page. Acacia’s home page calls it the “leader in technology licensing.”
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