Patent lawsuits hit a new low, Kodak owns OOP

Well it seems it's become the conerstone of American business now to hire employees to look through the patents the companies owns or has acquired through take-overs, and sue anybody that has infringed on these patents.  Even when that company thought up their technology independantly or when the patent covers such a standard or broad subject that it shouldn't be inforcable.

Kodak owns patents to "object oriented design" and has enforced them upon Sun (because of Java).  While this is extremely immoral, I can't feel to bad for Sun because of their lawsuit against Microsoft and Java.  While overall Sun was right, it was 3rd party innovation that caused the invention of the REAL web.  Any older nerd knows the web was text only and Netscape invented images and tables into the web (along with a few other things).  So I'm not so quick to dislike Microsoft for improving Java, perhaps Sun should have been more open minded and adopted Microsoft's changes into Java.

Well despite it's a good thing as goodbye Java, hello .Net, we like you better anyways.

For news about the Sun/Kodak lawsuit go here http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041004-4267.html

Update (10/8) - Sun pays Kodak $92mil http://techdirt.com/articles/20041007/154212.shtml
Unfortunetly they're just giving Kodak only part of the money they stole from MS with their silly lawsuits.