IP Innovation L.L.C. and Technology Licensing Corporation (collectively, "Plaintiffs") have brought a patent-infringement action against Red Hat, Inc., and Novell, Inc., alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Numbers 5,072,412; 5,533,183; and 5,394,521. The patents concern a user interface that has multiple workspaces. The Plaintiffs' complaint identifies as accused products "Red Hat Linux system," the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop," and the "Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server."
UPDATE: THESE THREE PATENTS WERE INVALIDATED BY THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT, EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS, ON APRIL 30, 2010, IN THE ABOVE REFERENCED ACTION.

WHAT'S NEEDED: REQUEST FOR INFORMATION

Prior Art

Knowledgeable Persons

February 13th, 2009

Often times one of the best means of identifying prior art is to contact persons involved with the development of this invention or persons involved with the development of inventions cited as prior art in the patent application (click on Read the Patent, find the Citations section of patents and other prior art, click on one of those items, and find the named inventor or author).
Submit Prior Art

COMMENTS

  1. Anne Marie Tobias, February 14th, 2009 at 09:33 PM
    This is an absurd patent, but prior art is easy to find. Ashton Tate, Inc. sold a very popular application called Framework, that employed "Multiple Work Spaces", and well as multiple files types, multiple application subfunctions, and a unified primary control interface.

    I think you will find that this instantly and utterly renders the patent worthless.
  2. Fuzzy, February 15th, 2009 at 06:07 PM
    Rob Pike - US 4,555,775 - http://research.google.com/people/r/
  3. Fuzzy, February 15th, 2009 at 06:13 PM
    Sudhir Ahuja - US 4,414,628 - http://www.spoke.com/info/pky8b5/SudhirAhuja
  4. Ozzee, February 16th, 2009 at 09:00 AM
    Patent 5,072,412 claims 1:

    ... a display;
    first and second workspace data structures relating respectively to first and second workspaces that can be presented on the display; each of the first and second workspaces including a respective set of display objects; each of the display objects being perceptible as a distinct, coherent set of display features; the display objects of each respective set being perceptible as having spatial positions relative to each other when the respective workspace is presented on the display;...

    Note the "as having spatial positions relative to each other " is very specifically not what Linux workspaces do. The claim is probably not infringed by the workspaces implementations in Linux distros.
  5. Bill Perilli, February 16th, 2009 at 06:04 PM
    There is a device called a 'word selector' which
    is part of a 'telemetry station' for a scientific payload.

    Such an item was already in world-wide use in the 1970's.

    This piece of telemetry equipment was hooked up to a
    demux box. The demux box would feed multiple word selectors
    set up on a rack system for use by the ground crew. All of this is IRIG standard equipment.

    On each system you were also able to run BNC connectors
    off of the back to a strip chart machine for paper printouts.

    The word selector (and there really could be as many as you want
    for as many scientists that you would like as long as you had the budget)
    would have multiple pages. Each of these would be a unique layout.

    Part of this were the control for the cut down of a balloon payload.
    There were multiples of these as well.

    This technology is most likely still in use by some science groups.
    The equipment that I used went back to the early 1970's and was like,
    third generation of this technology at that time.

    The whole thing was the 'workspace' for the payload.
  6. Sparky, February 19th, 2009 at 12:33 AM
    WindowMaker is based on NextStep. It has the feature to make windows persistent across workspaces. The ability to bind an application window into multiple workspaces (or all workspaces) appears to be the just of the claims of invention.

    NextStep was released in 1989, however, it was previewed starting in 1986 (according to the wikipedia NeXTStep article). NeXT might have documented prior art to at least some of the claims. (OTOH, it is also possible that NeXT licensed these patents from Xerox... ...well, no, the timing is wrong.)

    Of course NeXT was bought by Apple. So if Apple settled on this patent, it was likely because they could not defeat all of the claims. However, the Apple desktop and that of WindowMaker, Gnome and KDE, (not to mention others) are not the same. It is possible that prior art embodied in NeXTStep defeats the claims against these window managers.

    Now, GNUStep, (again according to the wikipedia OpenStep article), began development based on NeXTStep prior to the open API specification by Sun and NeXT in 1993. It is possible that some of the original GNUStep developers have information about NeXTStep that could constitute evidence of prior art on at least the claims that could be defeated by NeXTStep.

    If I was faced with busting these claims, I would start by talking to the NeXTStep or original GNUStep developers as the WM not only implemented the UI described in the patent but the object-oriented data strucutures in the underlying implementation as well. I would also see if Apple could be candid about why they settled on these claims inspite of being owners of NeXT IP.
  7. paul, April 30th, 2009 at 09:42 AM
    Also check out switcher/multifinder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiFinder which was Apple's first hack at a mutli app system that was done with multiple desktops the lived side by side and slid in on top of each other
  8. Jitiday, May 19th, 2009 at 04:49 AM
    I should email you about this.

Sorry, comments are closed.