Google Asks USPTO To Reexamine Four Oracle Patents

An anonymous reader writes "Google leaves no stone unturned in its defense against Oracle's patent and copyright infringement allegations. eWEEK reports on the latest development: Google has asked the USPTO to reexamine four of the seven patents asserted by Oracle. Patent watcher and skeptic Florian Mueller believes 'the world would be a better place without those virtual machine patents,' which he considers excessively broad and not really technical inventions. He also reports on a Google letter to the court, asking for permission to file a motion to throw out Oracle's copyright infringement allegations as soon as possible, without further discovery."

Comments

Re:Obvious things

[AvitarX]

Especially since the computer code has copyright protection anyway.

A better source...

[messagelost]

Here's a better dissection of Google's letter: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110216210828960

Some choice parts excluded from the OP's articles:

> materials identified by Oracle as infringing in fact created by a third party and released into the public domain

> the only two files allegedly containing "copied" code were created by Google and provided to Oracle for use in open source releases of Java

Re:This could be interesting...

[VGPowerlord]

...because if any of the patents are found to be unenforceable, because of either prior art or obviousness, then Oracle's suit falls apart. Take a look at RE38,104. This appears to be prior art.

Interesting times lie ahead.

How did this get modded "Insightful?"

Here's a quote from the original lawsuit filing from August last year:

Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and devices that operate Android infringe one or more claims of each of United States Patents Nos. 6,125,447; 6,192,476; 5,966,702; 7,426,720; RE38,104; 6,910,205; and 6,061,520."

(emphasis added)

In other words, this "prior art" you posted is one of the patents that Oracle is suing Google over, that Oracle acquired when they bought Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Summary Time

[YojimboJango]

Article summary from this and Groklaw:

Court: You're slamming us with paperwork so if you want to load our asses up with any more you have to summarize it first and give the other guy a chance to write a short summary of why you're full of it.

Google: Summary time then. You can't patent byte code and virtual machines. We're asking the US Patent office to take a second look at these dumb patents, and we're also asking that we put the whole trial on hold till we get an answer.

Court: You're still on the hook because Oracle says you have bunch of copied source files in Android. That's copyrights not patents.

Google: All but 12 of those source files are interfaces and we've got 3 previous cases that show that you can copy interfaces because they're interfaces and don't contain any actual code.

Google: Also two of the 12 files that they're suing us for were written by Google employees and given to Sun under an open source license.

Google: The remaining 10 files that we're totally not admitting that we straight stole from Java comprises less than one percent of the Android code base so we can get away with it because of "de minimus", which basically means we legally get to copy your crap so long as we don't do it too much.

Google: So basically Oracle copyright claim is full of crap and we should dismiss this whole case till the USPTO gets a chance to look at the patents.

Oracle: We've got two days to come up with reasons that you're full of crap, so expect a formal response soon.