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Oracle Fights EpicRealm Patents
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle is now fighting EpicRealm's web patents after Safelite settled with EpicRealm, then asked Oracle to pay, as per their software license agreement. EpicRealm's patents are vague and 'describe a technique where a web site updates only part of a website instead of having to rebuild the entire page. That may look a lot like DHTML, but apparently it isn't the same.'"
If something is to be patented that has been around a long time and it STILL gets patented, it usually means the patent clerk has no idea what he's doing. That doesn't surprise, even though they tend to be experts in their field, it is impossible to keep up with the development in the field of computer science.
Now, of course he knows all relevant patents (or, rather, he is able to look them up). But not everything in this field is patented, and "prior art" is usually not decades old and well known, more often than not you have prior art that's only a few years or months old, hardly known and far from penetrating the market, before someone comes up with the bright idea to file a patent for something that does roughly the same (without, of course, mentioning the general name of the non patented prior art). And there you go. A patent for something you didn't do anything for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This show why indemnification clauses is bad for open source projects. So including something like Postfix into a Linux distro or a *BSD may very well open you up for litigation in the future under certain conditions.
The idea behind a patent is to be as vague as it can be but at the same time very specific! Sounds impossible? Well that's why a good patent costs a lot of money. The lawyers who write patents mission is to write something that will cover as much ground but on a specific quality of the product.
Omgili - Find out what people are saying.
Every time I have looked at a patent my eyes glaze over since it is written in legalese which IMHO is nearly incomprehensible or just plain stupid to the professional engineer. Of course the reverse applies as well.
So here we have patent lawyers writing an application for a patent that they most likely don't have a clue about and on other the other side we have people who have the scientific knowledge that cannot understand the legalese. Now waiting in the wings are the patent trolls who don't care so long as the patent has some vague scientific facts that they can use to make a quick dollar because the people they sue cannot afford to fight the patent.
I hope Oracle forces a revamp of the patent system but I won't hold my breath.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
> Reminds me of people who "hate america" because they don't agree with you.
There are those innocent children and women that do not agree you to be bombed....
True, but if a company is know for draking every patent through the entire court system and never negotiate then the patent trolls are more likely to sue somebody else. So even if it cost more a blank "we do not engotiate with terroists" could be cheaper in the long run.
Freedom or George Bush