It seemed to work for Apple against Samsung, although in that case Samsung had 
already stopped selling the devices they were sued over.  I remember a lot of 
controversy over that because the patents were very generic as well.

Thanks,

Shawn Pierson
Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer

From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) 
[mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of William Rentfrow
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 4:15 PM
To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: BMC sues SNOW

**
The other point is that you don't have to convince an IT expert this is a 
violation of technology patent.  You have to convince a jury of people pulled 
at random from the general population - most of whom are intimidated by 
anything more complicated than a smart phone (and a lot of those are still 
using the default ring tone).

I don't know which side would be more likely to use their peremptory challenges 
first to toss any sort of IT person.  The plaintiffs may well know they're 
going to have a hard time convincing the IT guy their stuff is at all unique 
and worthwhile; at the same time the defense might want to toss anyone with any 
special knowledge in the IT realm.

Gotta run, apparently my cell is on the default ring tone....

William Rentfrow
wrentf...@stratacominc.com<mailto:wrentf...@stratacominc.com>
Office: 715-204-3061 or 701-232-5697x25
Cell: 715-498-5056

From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) 
[mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Rick Cook
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2014 4:06 PM
To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>
Subject: Re: BMC sues SNOW

**
Most patents these days aren't for new concepts, but slight - sometimes almost 
imperceptively so - tweaks in the way something is done.  We'll see how these 
come out, but I think the poster who suggested that this was more a marketing 
ploy than anything might be more on the mark than most.

Rick Cook

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 2:01 PM, John Baker 
<jba...@javasystemsolutions.com<mailto:jba...@javasystemsolutions.com>> wrote:
Hello

I've reviewed some of the patents and I was amused by what passes for a
'patent'.

http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5978594

This patent is all about agents running on hosts, controlled by a
central service. It is described as "novel", but it's not something
invented by BMC and is present in many other products. For example, both
IBM Websphere and Oracle Weblogic have a concept of a central service
(WAS deployment manager, WL admin server), that feeds
instructions/configuration to nodes running JVMs. This is not novel -
it's common place.

http://www.google.com/patents/US6816898

Collecting performance metrics. I can do that in a couple of lines of
Python and it's nothing new. A typical large bank will have lots of this
stuff, both purchased and home grown, littered on their networks with an
"operations team" constantly monitoring it.

http://www.google.co.in/patents/US6895586

This one is awful. It sounds like BMC claim to have invented a system of
storing data in a hierarchical document using namespaces - you know,
what we commonly refer to as XML. There's no intellectual property in
designing a schema.

http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US7062683

This patent seems to suggest BMC have invented a method of
troubleshooting via flowcharts - something I recall doing at school in
the mid-80s, and I recall plenty being present in my 6502 Assembler
guide.

I suspect this and other patent relates to the way in which a BMC
product works, but copying the concept is not a crime (Microsoft do not
own the concept of a word processor, or sending an email). Indeed, for
every concept pinched by a competitor, BMC will have pinched one
themselves - such as graphing data to display metrics, which is almost
certainly patented by some other company.

I think the core problem with many IT patents is they aren't actually
'inventions' but a great way for lawyers to make money. After all, they
are hardly going to turn around and tell a BMC senior manager, "I'm
sorry mate, but this patent has no value". Real inventions, such as
James Dyson's bag-less vacuum cleaner, have real value. These patents
seem to tell a competitor more about how the internals of a BMC product
works rather than defining an 'invention' of real value.


John

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I can use Google :)

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