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.'"

Comments

Shows why indemnification is bad for open source..

[Homology]

From the article:

Safelite allowed itself to be scared into settling, but not before the company looked at its software license agreement and saw that Oracle promised to indemnify the company against these claims.

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.

Re:The true problem with patents

[tomstdenis]

Solution, don't allow blue button patents.

Chances are if you tack "on the internet" to your patent claim it isn't original or non-obvious. A method of only updating part of a page? You mean like an IFRAME, Javascript and the DOM? Not exactly "new". I did a web programming class on it in 2001.

You'd think though, with the thousands of patents filed daily that we'd have flying cars, microwaves that you can put forks in, better televisions, magic food pills, etc...

Instead we have gas guzzling cars that will end society, microwaves using decades old technology, TV incompatibilities up the wazoo and fake sugar pills sold on SpikeTV at 2am. /sad

Tom

"EpicRealm's patents are vague"

[rangeva]

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.