Gnome Is Sued Over Shotwell Photo Software Patent Infringement
Rothschild Patent Imaging has sued the Gnome Foundation for patent infringements. The organization claims that photo manager Shotwell is infringing one of its patents. Gnome director Neil McGovern calls the charges ‘baseless’.
Shotwell is a program that allows users to import, edit and share photos to services such as Flickr and YouTube. It is the default photo manager in many Gnome distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora. Rothschild Patent Imaging now claims that Gnome is infringing one of Rothschild’s patents with Shotwell. This patent describes a system for sending digital photos from a recording device, such as a camera, to a receiving device, such as a computer.
In the indictment, Rothschild writes that being able to import and share the photo files is patent infringement. The ability to organize photos in certain topics, such as events, group photos and individuals, is also an infringement of the patent, Rothschild claims. The fact that these filtered images can then be uploaded wirelessly to social media is also a patent infringement, according to the indictment.
Rothschild is now asking the court to force Gnome to stop these activities and to oblige the open source developer to pay damages, or to force Gnome to pay a rolling royalty. Gnome writes in a response that it cannot comment further on the lawsuit, besides that the charge is ‘unfounded’ and that the foundation will defend itself.
Rothschild Patent Imaging is a so-called non-practicing entity company. This means that the company buys up or applies for patents, but does not produce anything itself. The revenue model is to get money from companies that may infringe the patents through royalty agreements or lawsuits.
Two years ago, Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations sued Garmin. Connected Devices Innovations is owned by the same owner as Rothschild Patent Imaging. After Garmin’s lawyer indicated that he wanted the patent invalid, Rothschild withdrew the suit. Garmin, in turn, sued Rothschild’s company again for the costs incurred. In that complaint, Garmin wrote that the company uses patents it knows to be invalid, purely to make money. In doing so, the company would ask relatively little money from the party that would infringe, possibly in the hope that they would give in anyway.