Je suppose que la FSF US est au courant. Laurent
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2005080914234645 << Patent Infringement Lawsuits That Involve FOSS Wednesday, August 10 2005 @ 11:55 PM EDT I have the unhappy task of telling you that patent infringement lawsuits have been filed that impact FOSS. The company doing it is J2 Global Communications, Inc. -- the eFax people -- against Mijanda, Inc., Easytel, Inc., and Protus IP Solutions. Here's the complaint [PDF] against Mijanda. It was filed in California by J2 and Catch Curve, Inc., on August 5, 2005. Who is Catch Curve? I'll let them describe themselves, from the complaint: "Catch Curve is an intellectual property development and licensing firm focused on communications and messaging technologies." Another way to put it, in my language, is to say that they are a patent troll. Each plaintiff contributes one patent to this suit against Mijanda: -- J2's, which they got by assignment, is #6,208,638, "Method and Apparatus For Transmission And Retrieval of Facsimile and Audio Messages Over a Circuit or Packet Switched Network." -- Catch Curve got its by assignment also, #6,785,021, "Facsimile Telecommunications System and Method." What the plaintiffs are asking for is monetary damages for past "infringement", injunctive relief against continued "infringement" of the patents, and to get paid "reasonable" royalties going forward. I put infringement in quotation marks, because there is some question as to the validity of J2's patents, as I'll explain. David Sugar brought this to my attention, and he told me about the FOSS connection: Mijanda offers a fax to email gateway hosting service on Asterisk, a GPL licensed general purpose IP-PBX available under GNU/Linux. I believe one of the other companies involved is using Hylafax, which is another much older free software solution specific to faxing. The short list of free software packages that are potentially effected includes mgetty+sendfax, some of the fax stuff found in GNOME (and maybe KDE), hylafax, Bayonne, and Asterisk. In terms of prior art, whether one considers fax machines, classical fax modems, or even the very old mgetty+sendfax package used for doing fax to email and email to fax on GNU/Linux machines for maybe 20 years now, I am rather certain there is a great deal of relevant and readily demonstrable prior art in this area, besides the ridiculous nature of these patents. The complaint says Mijanda offers its customers various services, including fax services through SmartFax and Fax Micro. [...] Groklaw is nonpolitical, but it seemed worthwhile to inform you that the act is currently being debated, so you can follow it, if you've a mind to. So, to sum up, we have patent infringement lawsuits to worry about. Some of you will be able to find prior art on the patents being used against Mijanda in your sleep, I'd guess. But isn't it a crying shame that someone has to? >> _______________________________________________ Liste de discussion FSF France. http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-france
