Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/13/p2p_guys_sue_google_amazon_for_cloud_patents/
P2P veterans sue the Cloud ... for copying their stuff
Man, this is totally different to the RIAA
Posted in Virtualization, 13th December 2011 09:38 GMT
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Google, Amazon, Dropbox and VMWare are on the receiving end of a law suit brought by former P2Ptards who claim that cloud products from the big companies infringe their peer-sharing patents.
Kazaa founder Kevin Bermeister and StreamCast and Morpheus founder Michael Weiss - two pioneers of file-sharing in the early 2000s - have banded together to launch the ambitious law suit from Texas.
Bermeister is Australian and Weiss was based in Miami, but the two have pooled their patents and set up a joint company based in Texas - PersonalWeb [1]. PersonalWeb describes itself as owning "some really amazing patents" available for licensing, according to the Sydney Morning Herald [2].
According to the story, the pair will argue that many of today's enterprise IT products such as virtualisation and the cloud were derived from peer-to-peer technology used in the last decade.
More famous for being accused of a casual attitude to other people's IP - Morpheus and Kazaa were sued by music industry body RIAA in 2004 - Bermeister has turned to the courts to claim that the tech companies violate several of his patents in their cloud computing products, "including content addressable storage and/or distributed search engine technologies". ®