Open Source Summit: How projects defend themselves against patent trolls

A key announcement at the Open Source Summit in Vienna was the expanded partnership with the Unified Patents organization. The central goal remains unchanged: combating so-called patent trolls and protecting open source projects. For the latter, however, the expansion brings further advantages.

CNCF and LF together

The partnership between the Linux Foundation and Unified Patents started in 2019. What's new now? First of all, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is now an equal partner alongside the Linux Foundation (LF). This means that if a project is exclusively a member of the CNCF and not the LF, direct access to the expertise of Unified Patents was previously not possible. Unfortunately, the target of patent trolls has recently shifted to the cloud-native sector. The CNCF and the LF therefore had to take action. There is already an initial success story: the subject matter was patent US-7949785-B2 (Secure Virtual Community Network System) and Kubernetes.

The depth of access to expertise is also new, as Unified Patents not only has immense experience in dealing with and combating patent trolls, but also very sophisticated tools and processes. LF and CNCF members have access to a whole range of reports, programs and information channels. These include, for example, an annual NPE risk analysis (Non-Practicing Entity – technical term for patent troll). Here, Unified Patents checks whether the open source project is threatened by the current patent troll campaign and may therefore be affected in the future.

Patents always checked

Also included is an analysis of the patent portfolio, which is typically very extensive. The representative of the open source project uses the Unified Patents data analysis portal for this. Access to PATROLL is particularly interesting: this is a program that checks existing patents for their validity or legality. According to Mike Dolan (Senior Vice President and General Manager – Projects and Legal at the Linux Foundation), it happens too often that someone claims a technology as their intellectual property –. In fact, the underlying knowledge has long been common knowledge. The patent is therefore not legitimate and the same applies to the associated claims. The universe of patent trolls is therefore constantly changing. It is important to keep up to date.

A full list of the benefits of the partnership can be found in the LF and CNCF announcement. It should also be noted that only Platinum membership status grants full access. There are restrictions for Gold, Silver and others.

There will also be a PATROLL competition at the upcoming KubeCon from November 12 to 15, 2024 in Salt Lake City. This means that participants can actively contribute to protecting open source from patent trolls on site.

(mack)