Google donates 79 more patents to shield the cloud from lawsuits
August 8, 2013
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jeff John Roberts.
Google is ramping up its campaign to protect the cloud from the sort of nuisance patent lawsuits that have engulfed the smartphone and app-developer industries. On Thursday, the company designated 79 more patents to be part of its “Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge,” which amounts to a non-aggression pact under which anyone can use the technology described in the patents — anyone, that is, who doesn’t use patents to attack Google first.
The news, announced in a blog post, is significant because the patents relate to essential elements of “big data,” which is one the most important fields in technology right now. Google hopes the newly added patents, which it acquired from IBM and CA Technologies, expand the areas of cloud software in which developers can innovate without fear of being sued…
When the company announced the non-aggression pact in March, the pledge applied to just 10 patents related to MapReduce and Hadoop programming models. The new patents, according to a source at Google, cover different areas related to data-center technologies. In particular, they cover methods for operating data centers efficiently and for so-called “alarm monitoring.”…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2013/08/08/google-donates-79-more-patents-to-shield-cloud-from-lawsuits/