Texas Courts Tells Patent Troll That They Cannot Patent Simple Math

A patent troll, Uniloc, who has a long history of suing tech firms has sued Hosting company, Rackspace. Uniloc claims Rackspace allegedly violated their patent by selling Linux-based server systems, but the judge rubbished that claim by dismissing the case, saying that it basically describes a simple math operation.

Uniloc filed against Rackspace during June 2012 in a Texas based district court, saying that Rackspace has violated their patent by using, selling and/or importing servers that run Linux Kernels that used for processing floating points required to work with Rackspace hosting business.

Uniloc filed for a patent in 1995 and then being approved in 1999. The patent #5,490,216 states that the invention is a “method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers.” but Chief Judge in the district court saying that this concept doesn’t deserve patent protection as the invention involves nothing more than using the round numbers before an arithmetic computation.

Judge Leonard Davis said that Uniloc’s first claim which is a formula to solve mathematical problems is nothing more than a mere improvement of a mathematical formula, even when tied to computing.

Uniloc once sued Microsoft for $388 Million of which the district court judge overturned the verdict. But Microsoft finally settled the case with Uniloc last year for an undisclosed amount. Currently, Uniloc filed 12 new cases on March 21st with Eastern District of Texas against companies like Activision Blizzard, EA, Aspyr media, Digital river, McAfee, Sony, Symantec, Sage Software, SolarWinds, Pervasive Software and WildPackets.

Source: Ars Technica