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back to article Patent shark‘s copyright claim could bite all Unix

A company registered in minor league tax haven the Cook Islands, but with a subsidiary in Delaware, lawyers in the patent-troll heaven of East Texas and an office in Sydney, Australia, has asserted intellectual property rights over all versions of Unix and “Unix-like derivatives” and plans to seek royalties from every company …

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  1. pete 22
    Meh

    April Fools!

    April Fools!

    13 2
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: April Fools!

      Yes it is, but I can't lie to you, I was sort of hoping for another SCO VS. IBM style drama to unfold. Call me an ass, but Daryl McBribe did give us something to look for on a daily basis! Wonder what ever happened to him...

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      1. Ron Christian
        Reply Icon

        Re: April Fools!

        I have to agree. I had the SCO graph from Yahoo stocks up on my wall for a long time. The one where it moves along like a regular stock, and then the verdict comes through, and it dives straight into the dirt. So satisfying.

        1 0
    2. Turtle
      Reply Icon

      Re: April Fools!

      I figured out at this line: "An attorney identifying himself as Ernest K Malley, who spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity". And *that* brought to mind "Ern Malley" so I did not think that The Reg erroneously revealed a confidential source....

      1 1
      1. Notas Badoff
        Reply Icon
        Facepalm

        Re: April Fools!

        @Turtle: Thank you for the reference, as looking up "Ern Malley" at WP found

        "They particularly despised the well-funded modernist poetry magazine Angry Penguins and ..."

        Not that we know any angry penguins, no...

        0 0
    3. jake Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: April Fools!

      Weak attempt, though. FourOne IP? nsfw daemon? C'mon.

      F. Must do better.

      8 2
    4. LarsG
      Reply Icon

      Re: April Fools!

      Tut tut...

      0 0
    5. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: April Fools!

      Please Register, in the future, moderate your April Fools comments to remove any pointing out it is a joke, so we can have a laugh at all those comment posts that have taken it seriously.

      13 0
      1. arrbee
        Reply Icon

        Re: April Fools!

        I suspect they keep the comments in to save their colleagues in the 'mainstream' press picking it up and running with it - amusing for us, but perhaps less so for those with friends / ambitions in the industry.

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        1. Ron Christian
          Reply Icon

          Re: April Fools!

          Except they probably would anyway.

          0 0
      2. keithpeter Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Pint

        Re: April Fools!

        "so we can have a laugh at all those comment posts that have taken it seriously."

        This one is just a little to obvious ('filing copyright' &c). Funny though.

        0 0
      3. Annihilator
        Reply Icon
        Meh

        Re: April Fools!

        Please Register, in the future, moderate your April Fools comments to remove any pointing out it is a joke, so we can have a laugh at all those comment posts that have taken it seriously."

        Sadly in this case we couldn't have laughed too hard given how close to reality this was :-|

        "Patent troll attempts to patent blatantly un-patentable thing" is a recurring theme these days.

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    6. Gordan
      Reply Icon

      Re: April Fools!

      Yeah. Given how similar it sounds to the whole sorry SCO affair, though, it makes you wonder if that was just the biggest, most expensive, longest running prank of all time. It certainly would have had more credibility as such.

      1 0
      1. Dave 126 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: April Fools!

        I thought something about this story smelt a little fishy... so I did a Google Nose search on the odour, and my suspicions were confirmed.

        http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/nose/

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  2. Kevin 6

    Almost had me for a minute as I've see real lawsuits that were stupider till I noticed 2 glaring issues in the story itself. Then checked the date, and was like OK nice try

    4 0
  3. pierce
    Facepalm

    weak sauce.

    2 0
  4. Richard Lloyd
    FAIL

    Was doing OK until 'nsfw daemon'

    A nice try, but spoiled half way through with the "nsfw daemon" - leave that out and the date-based company name was a lot more subtle.

    12 0
    1. francescor82
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Re: Was doing OK until 'nsfw daemon'

      I fell for it too until the "nsfw daemon" reference. It's a daemon I wrote myself recently, so it couldn't be patented by someone else.

      0 0
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And the idiocy begings once again

    And once again, the idiocy begins, as people with little clue try to make something "funny" for the first, and fail, miserably.

    Poor April: between the first and the 15th, it just cannot catch a break.

    0 14
  6. Nanki Poo
    Pint

    Fun I thought . . .

    On me.

    nK

    0 0
  7. Rukario
    Pint

    Good one

    Took me a while to realise that it was already 1 April there.

    0 1
  8. Number6

    Not Quite

    Ah well, nearly caught by the timezone thing, given that it's still 31st March here (3/31 for the natives). Reading quite credulously until I got to the bit about the lawyer's name and I stopped to laugh, thinking that El Reg had decided to just publish his name anyway for a ridiculous lawsuit. Then the penny dropped.

    0 0
    1. Sir Runcible Spoon
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not Quite

      "(3/31 for the natives)"

      I think you mean 31/3 :)

      1 0
  9. Andy Tunnah
    Thumb Up

    Ah you bunch of miserable gits, I thought it was a really good go at aprils fools...what the hell do you expect, a gag of such of wit and discombobulatiion (yeah, I'm not sure that's a word..) that it rivals the radio broadcasts of orvell wells ?

    In any case, I likes

    2 3
    1. Andy Tunnah
      Reply Icon

      orson welles even...i thought that looked wrong..

      0 1
      1. frank ly
        Reply Icon

        Orvell was his brother and had a good career as a stand-up comedian. Not many people know that.

        2 0
  10. Charles Manning

    You had me until

    "Patent shark's copyright..."

    Should have buried the gaffes until a bit later.

    0 0
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    April 1?

    0 0
  12. Esskay
    Pint

    FOURONE IP

    Was what triggered it...

    If the company began with "A" and ended with "E" I probably would have believed it...

    2 1
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: FOURONE IP

      Hey, man - keep Adobe out of this.

      4 0
  13. Martin 71 Silver badge
    Pint

    Four One IP, yes. If you'd made it One Four, I'd have clicked immediately. Bloody colonials!

    9 0
  14. VeganVegan
    Happy

    Nice April Fools article.

    Could have asserted that the original social media, Usenet, especially its alt.sex groups, were some of the first to trigger the nsfw daemon.

    Then again, maybe copyright claims that were violated & left un-protested for so many years may be deemed abandoned, much like spam, kleenex and xeroxing had entered the lexicon, to the chagrin (or tacit approval in the case of spam) of the respective owners.

    0 0
  15. FlatEarther
    Linux

    Ern Malley

    Liked the reference to Ern Malley, a fictitious poet, the main character in an old Australian literary hoax. Ironic too that Ern's poems were published in a journal named "Angry Penguins".

    2 0
    1. Francis Boyle Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Ern Malley

      Little known fact: every line of Ern Malley's poems is valid Perl code.

      1 0
    2. keithpeter Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Re: Ern Malley

      http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/33/wertheim.php

      Excellent stuff. Someone should do a t-shirt of the Angry Penguins magazine cover.

      0 0
  16. F. Svenson
    FAIL

    Lame....

    You can do better...

    How about a story on OEM's using Itanium?

    1 0
  17. Daniel B.
    Happy

    Was falling...

    'till the 'nsfw daemon'. References to "the adult industry" made me remember that it is already April 1st on the GMT timezone.

    A good one, El Reg!

    1 0
  18. J. Cook Silver badge
    Go

    Well played. Call me suckered. :D

    1 1
  19. url
    Pint

    41.co.ck

    still the best tld

    1 0
  20. RAMChYLD
    Boffin

    You got me there.

    I was totally caught in until I got to the 'nsfw daemon' part. Lack of sleep can make one extremely gullible and fall for anything (and apparently, break your memory and slow it down to the speed of molasses- I just fell for a prank minutes prior), but then since I spent the last few days trying to get a goddamned UEFI box with Fakeraid (in this case, AMD chipset SATA RAID) to work in Debian and failing spectacularly, it got me thinking and I recalled that I didn't see any nsfw daemon when Debian was starting up, then the meaning of NSFW dawned upon me...

    Protip: EFI and fakeraid don't go together in Linux land and many distros hate it when you set your storage up like that. I only had 4 hours of sleep over the last four days because of said setuup...

    0 0
    1. A J Stiles
      Reply Icon
      Linux

      Re: You got me there.

      The ONLY RAID worth using in Linux is ordinary kernel md RAID. Not fake hardware RAID with a proprietary driver; not even true hardware RAID which presents a single logical drive to the host.

      You'll find out why, if you ever lose a RAID controller .....

      1 1
    2. keithpeter Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Re: You got me there.

      "I only had 4 hours of sleep over the last four days because of said setuup..."

      Stop doing voluntary work!

      If you were paid at the usual hourly rate for that kind of time, would it not have been cheaper to buy a non-UEFI motherboard?

      0 0
      1. RAMChYLD
        Reply Icon
        Boffin

        Re: You got me there.

        Actually, it's more like doing my own experiments, but yeah.

        I gave up on it yesterday night and threw out the raid setup. Now it's sitting on a saner regular LVM setup that spans both disks.

        0 0
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: You got me there.

      Same here. But, to be fair, the "four one" and "Ern Malley" clues were a bit wasted on those of us this side of the pond.

      %s/Ernest Malley/William McGonagall/g

      0 0
    4. sisk
      Reply Icon

      Re: You got me there.

      I think the fact that so many people were taken in right up until the 'nsfw daemon' shows that we don't believe any claim too ridiculous for patent trolls.

      4 0
  21. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Happy

    Disbelief

    Pics or it didn't happen

    0 0
  22. stizzleswick
    Coat

    I would like to join in...

    ...with the general feeling here that even for an April Fools' bit, this is rather weak...

    Hand me back my wallet, I have already paid up...

    2 0

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  24. El_Fev
    Thumb Up

    Nice try :)

    Almost had me going lol

    1 1
  25. Andy H
    Happy

    There's no way that Ernest K Malley is going to "Steal my kernel" or Linus's come to that.

    0 0

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