Kodak Files Suit Against Sun Over Java Intellectual Property

Kodak Sun Microsystems

Two years of fruitless negotiations over the rights to Java intellectual property have now landed in U.S. District Court in Rochester, N.Y.

In a statement, Kodak said it filed the suit after trying "to resolve this matter with Sun for more than two years. The discussions between the companies have not led to a suitable license agreement."

"Kodak has invested millions of dollars in developing and purchasing technologies and needs to protect its intellectual property--putting licensing agreements in place protects Kodak's ability to further innovate and compensates the company for its investments."

Kodak, Rochester, bought the software assets of Wang and changed its name to Eastman Software in 1997. Among the assets were three patents relating to object technology--the earliest being granted in 1993.

Early indications are that, at least among the Java solution provider and developer community, Kodak has a tough sell.

Chad Darby, president of J9 Consulting, a Philadelphia-based Java solution provider, suggested it would be difficult for Kodak to argue it bought high-speed technology from Wang.

"Sun is the father, or the mothership, of Java technology," Darby said. He said historically Sun's James Gosling has been credited with developing Java as a way to make C++ based programming less cumbersome.

"If there were folks from the C++ community making these claims, I might see that," Darby said. "Wang was based on mainframes and Cobalt."

One of the patents, granted in 1993, is titled, "Multitasking computer system for integrating the operation of different application programs which manipulate data objects of different types."

Inside the abstract of the patent, Wang then described its technology as "an object-based data processing system including an extensible set of object types and a corresponding set of 'object managers' wherein each object manager is a program for operating with the data stored in a corresponding type of object."

Sun, in a statement, painted Kodak's infringement claims as baseless.

"Based on discussions over many months with Kodak, Sun believes that this suit is without merit, and, accordingly, will defend itself vigorously and is confident that it will prevail," Sun said in the statement.

It is not the first legal entanglement Sun has faced over Java. In a high-profile lawsuit, Sun sued Microsoft for what it said was violation of a licensing agreement over Java. The suit was settled last year when Microsoft agreed to pay Sun $20 million and agreed to cancel the previous licensing deal.

According to legal papers in that suit, Sun described Java as being comprised of "a standardized application programming environment that affords software developers the opportunity to create and distribute a single version of programming code that is capable of operating on many different, otherwise incompatible systems platforms and browsers."