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British Telecom (BT) is Still a Patent Bully: Next Target is Yet Another GNU/Linux Supporter

Valve of Steam OS (Debian GNU/Linux) fame

Summary: The latest target of BT's patent bullying (shakedowns and lawsuits) is the company that has turned into somewhat of a Debian proponent (albeit with DRM)

BT is a patent aggressor whose activities in the court we haven't heard of in a while (it even targeted Android). BT shows no sign of relenting. This unpopular strategy carries on and the latest suggests that "British Telecommunications (BT) have filed a lawsuit against Valve claiming patent infringement. The action was brought “based on Valve’s continued willful infringement” of four patents (I’ll go into what they are in a moment) and was filed in Delaware on 28 July."

"It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully)."Notice the choice of Delaware. The British and US media wrote quite a lot about this lawsuit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. So far we have found 22 articles about this lawsuit alone (that's a lot for patent news) and it looks rather obvious that BT is just getting desperate. It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully).

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