In July it sold some patents to Allied Security Trust (AST), a cost-sharing non-profit operation that buys up patents to protect its members, companies like HP, Google, Cisco and Verizon, against pricey patent litigation, particularly by so-called patent trolls.
AST operates under what it calls a "catch and release" policy. Once its members get non-exclusive licenses to the IP, it puts the patents back on the market. It does not assert patents.
Well, AST "released" the old Microsoft patents and the Open Invention Network (OIN), the Linux-only version of AST whose sometimes overlapping members include IBM, Google, Novell, Red Hat and Philips, swooped in and bought them for an undisclosed sum, claiming that the 22 patents were Linux-related and that it was saving Linux from the trolls and their demand for royalties, a motivation it ascribed to AST buying them in the first place.
It said that the portfolio derived originally from SGI - although we heard elsewhere that there were others in the mix - which maybe makes them OpenGL-related. OIN does not identify the patents or explain how they bear on Linux.
As a matter of fact, in its public statement of self-congratulations OIN says, "The prospect of these patents being placed in the hands of non-practicing entities [a k a trolls] was a threat that has been averted with these purchases, irrespective of patent quality and whether or not the patents truly read on Linux."
So maybe they're valid and enforceable and maybe they implicate Linux or maybe they don't, but trolls don't need solid patents to create a rumpus- or so the argument goes.
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