Sun settles Java suit with Kodak

Sun on Thursday announced that it settled the lawsuit Eastman Kodak had brought against it, but the charge that Sun’s Java violated software patents held by Kodak brought to light the major impact patents can have on software techniques.

Sun has agreed to pay $92 million in the settlement, which comes just six days after a New York jury found Sun guilty of violating Kodak’s patents but before any damages had been awarded. Kodak had been seeking $1.06 billion in lump-sum royalties.

Under terms of the settlement, Sun has licensed all of Kodak’s patents for use with its Java-based products, said May Petry, a Sun spokeswoman.

“This is one of the things when you hit your head and say, ‘How can this possibly be valid?’ If Java infringes, then what doesn’t?” said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata.

The New York jury’s Oct. 1 verdict that Java violated Kodak patents demonstrates how software patents can ultimately stifle innovation when a patent holder demands royalties for what were considered royalty-free technologies.

“I think [this case] continues to create a real cooling effect overall on innovation,” hurting open source development, for instance, said analyst Thomas Murphy, vice president at Meta Group.

Murphy suggested that trademarks or copyrights be used for software instead of patents because they are not as overreaching as patents.

Kodak initially sued Sun in 2002, claiming that during Sun’s development of its Java programming language the company violated three patents issued in the mid-1990s. Kodak acquired the patents related to object technologies from Wang Laboratories in 1997. Developers and industry analysts had criticized the jury’s verdict, saying that Kodak’s patents covered techniques that had, in fact, been around since the 1960s.

The patents apply to a technique for allowing two pieces of software to agree how to interoperate — a key concept in object-oriented programming that dates back to before the patents were filed for the Simula language, which was created in the 1960s, Eunice said.

By settling the lawsuit, Sun isn’t necessarily agreeing that the Kodak patents are valid, but it does appear to be taking a step back from its previous stance of dismissing the patent claims as being without merit. “We are not admitting or denying the allegations,” Petry said.

The agreement does not cover non-Java technologies such as Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite and its Solaris operating system, Petry said.