Microsoft, HP, IBM safe from Kodak software patent

IDG News Service - While a Friday patent lawsuit verdict against Sun Microsystems Inc. could have a wide-ranging impact on the computer industry, the ruling appears unlikely to affect three of the world's largest IT companies, which have licensed the technology in question. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Microsoft Corp. are all licensees of the software patents, the patents' owner, Eastman Kodak Co., confirmed yesterday.
A federal jury in New York ruled Friday that Sun's Java technology violated several Kodak patents (see story), setting the stage for a damages ruling against Sun that could cost the computer maker as much as $1.06 billion -- the amount being sought by Kodak.
The ruling immediately raised questions about whether Kodak's patent claims could affect other IT vendors.
Some of Kodak's patents are so broadly stated that they could cover technologies as varied as the Windows operating system, the Microsoft .Net platform or even IBM's DB2 database, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H.
Kodak's patents, developed by Wang Laboratories Inc.'s imaging software unit before it was purchased by Kodak in 1997, essentially cover a technique for allowing two pieces of software to agree how to interoperate -- a key concept in object-oriented programming that dates to the Simula computer language, created in the 1960s, before the patents were filed, Eunice said.
"This is one of the things when you hit your head and say, How can this possibly be valid?" he said. "If Java does these things and infringes, then what doesn't?"
Java developer Adam Baker agreed with Eunice that the techniques covered in Kodak's patents were developed years before the patents themselves were issued.
"I'd be surprised if either via the appeals process or a separate application to the patent office the [patents don't] get rejected, although these things are never certain," said Baker, a senior consultant engineer in the U.K., who asked that his employer's name not be published. "I think some serious overhaul of the patents system is required to avoid patents on trivial inventions, which would probably stop most, if not all, software patents."
Though industry analysts like Eunice initially speculated that Microsoft could be vulnerable to a similar lawsuit over the techniques used by its .Net platform, that scenario now does not appear to be likely.

The patents in question are numbered 5,226,161, 5,206,951 and 5,421,012, said Jim Blamphin, a spokesman for Kodak.
Blamphin declined to comment on any plans for future litigation, or on whether Kodak was actually using the patented technologies in question. "We're just not