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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."
Especially since the computer code has copyright protection anyway.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Dangerous business, that. Bad for an author's reputation. He's just another Enderle, O'Gara, or DiDio now. A shame, that. He did good work once upon a time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's lobbying game now, actually. The one who pulls the right strings wins.
I was under the distinct impression that the way this game is played is that they make a backroom deal, then cross license their "technologies," and then threaten and intimidate all the "little people." Actually fighting back and going after the patents themselves seems very unfair and not very nice. Shame on google for not playing nice and thinking different. This can only be bad for business.
...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.
Disclaimer:
I am rooting for Google.
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
Why, yes, there has been changes to patent laws since then.
Several court rules, including a couple from SCOTUS have changed the rules. You might think these don't apply retroactively, but a review is not strictly a retroactive action. They would have to apply the current standards for any review.
Things like Prior Art, Obviousness, overly broad patents have all had reviews in the courts, as any google search will reveal.
Patents are challenged almost weekly, and a significant number of these are invalidated.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Um... so in other words, you are saying that if you were a (high ranking) employee at a profitable company like Google you would risk being sued, losing your job and all other job offers, simply because you think that releasing code increases "freedom of information"? Look, I can admire the people who leaked information about abuses to Wikileaks because people deserve to know where their tax dollars are going and that is the only way they can make informed choices. On the other hand though, releasing something like Google's code does really no good while putting you/your family in financial ruin.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Software or an algorithm shouldn't be patentable because they aren't inventions, they are ideas or mathematics. Inventions are patentable, ideas are not.
I don't see how Google's actions are hypocritical. What is the link between four patents owned by Oracle and Google's entire patent portfolio? If Google's patents are a: invalid and/or b: standing in the way of progress, rest assured Google's competitors will contest their validity, much the same as Google has done here.
Much of the patented work on MP3 and related psycho-acoustic modeling technology were well predated by work on signal processing for cochlear implants. If the USPTO had vaguely qualified examiners with enough time ti actually examine the patents, they would have realized that.
As a Sun admin I have found that ever since Oracle bought Sun, they have dropped support and development for number of products, and asserted their "big brother" control over others. Oracle has since bullied many (including Google) for the patent code. I keep wondering... Is Oracle becoming a patent-trolling company? It is obvious that only Google at this time can go head-to-head with Microsoft in every area of the Market... why can't Oracle do what it did best... continue working on the databases? Otherwise, I do not think the computer industry can afford another SCO to hinder innovation and development being threatened by the patent-holders.
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.
Of course, doing something USEFUL with the mathematics is what is patented, not the math itself. You may as well say that all mechanical or electronic devices are 'just physics', drugs are 'just chemistry', etc.
You aren't a martyr for any worthwhile cause then. If you want to look at a martyr, look a Bradley Manning.
Explain how releasing Google's source code benefits the world as a whole. It doesn't. Sure, it might be -neat- and sure, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the rest of them want the information but it doesn't benefit the world as a whole. This isn't some lifesaving cancer drug, this isn't stopping a war, this isn't deposing of a dictator. This is a search algorithm. The most it would do if released would benefit Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, etc.
He wouldn't be a martyr because this isn't a cause to make someone a martyr because releasing this isn't benefiting the world.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Algorithms patents usually are written as device patents, usually starting with "A System and Method to ...". The disctinction is a bit arbitrary to begin with.
Is "a computer programmed to do X" a device? If I have a cool new algorithm for the shift plan for an automatic transmission, is a non-computerized implementation fundamentally different than a computerized one?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
i suspect they chose the 4 weakest patents that they know are bunk and have the highest chance of being overturned.
this will set a very good example for all those other pesky patents they're being sued over.
TFA misses a very important point of strategy - Google aren't filing patents like mad because that's not a game they are playing. they are massive innovators, but their business model is not technology so much as advertising. the patents aren't as valuable to them as they are to Oracle, and if Google lose 576 patents it'll be nothing to the many thousands that other companies stand to lose if they are ever challenged.
Google can afford many lawyers, and these 4 patents might just be the tip of the wedge that they plan to drive into ALL software patents.
here's hoping. the MPEG-LA are already shitting bricks at Google's VP8 e-penis.
Except it's search code would be worthless if publically available. It would be trivial to game it.
Information wants to be beer.
>valuable algorithm
Algorithms are unpatentable in the entire world.
>more than full disclosure.
Have you read some "computer-implemented method" loophole patents? They usually don't even include a reference implementation.
As for secrecy, there's no way for algorithms to be kept secret. If it's important (and most are not), someone will "reverse-engineer" (i.e. read) it, or just rediscover the same algorithm by himself. It's just mathematics.
And nowadays reverse compilers get you almost the original code back, automatically.
As for putting stuff into hardware, fine, vote with your wallet (also, it's still in there and can be read).
Patent protection for computer-implemented inventions are worse than useless. There's copyright already and the pace of the computer industry is so fast you don't need patents (which is why we don't have them, I guess). If your competitors want to copy something, let them. In the time they take to copy it you are at version 93953539 and they are at version 0.1. How does this even become an issue?
On the other hand, some weirdos who think they invented fourier transform (only a few hundred years late) would be making signal processing a minefield.
And don't forget that pure software shops are the minority of all programming jobs, why have special protection for 0.1% of the programmers (and of these, they would mostly block each other with trivialities), blocking the other 99.9% from doing their work (since everything would be a patent minefield)?
I really wonder where this damn elitism comes from, it's not that there's a lot of missing stuff in computer science anyhow. We've figured out how to program computers, now we program computers.
I think skippy has it right:
Patent Reform:
Patents Are For Inventors Act
You can only file a patent on a physical object. You must have a working prototype, or a set of schematics that can be followed to build a working prototype. Specifically illegal to attempt to patent anything that was not created yourself, or by an authorized representative of you. Attempting to patent something that you did not invent will now be a felony.
No more patenting software, game mechanics, or ideas on how to accomplish things.
Patent Trolling will result in Federal Prison.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I'm not claiming that there was no innovation at all in MP3, it was some nice work but that it was hardly so non-obvious and novel that it deserved a 20 year legal monopoly plus the thicket of follow on patents extending the monopoly. The very same techniques were already in use for years at the time in an even more extreme form.
The objective of the processor in the cochlear implant was to take the entire human auditory range in and drop it down to a signal in 8 to 16 frequency bands (later 32) such that it would be usable for understanding speech or even appreciating music. The big difference between that and MP3 was that the bandwidth was far more restricted and instead of writing the bits out to a file they were translated into voltages on the implanted electrodes.
Patents are supposed to cover new inventions, not new uses for old inventions. The new inventions may contain old inventions within (really that's inevitable) but that's quite different.
There was NO question that lossy compression based on a transform to the frequency domain and dropping information that a listener couldn't perceive would work. The only question was if the reconstructed audio would be good enough for a listener with normal hearing to accept in trade for the compression. A secondary question was if the amount of compression could beat simple lossless compression.
I agree with you.
People getting software patents should publish their source code, and not get copyright on it. After 15 years it's public domain. A very good point.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Actually, it's a huge mess. Many entities have made many claims on pretty much anything that conforms to the standard file structure and plays audio. Every possible abuse of patents has been tried in some form or another in the area of MP3.
Anyone working in software R&D for a big company knows that such patent filling numbers are absurd. Sure great research is done at IBM, but 5000 patents... This becomes just another metric for management. Employees have objectives and rewards to fill maximum number of patent idea.
Off course quality of these patents is really low. I have seen patent on stuff everybody already do for years.
I've even seen someone patenting a design failure. We had to cope with his faulty software, because to save time for him he used a ugly trick that cause plenty of issues for other system parts. Then we heard he was given a reward for patenting his bug.
I don't see the fundamental difference between the arrangement of cogs, springs and rods (say), and the arrangement of conditionals and loops.
Artificial scarcity anyone? One is copyable/usable by 6,900,000,000+ people at little or no cost. The other isn't.
The onus is on any patent proponent to show why billions of people should be blocked from using an idea, their free speech, to give a small number of people additional profit, for every single area of technology. Not for anybody else to prove that patents are not applicable.
Patents are a damaging, unnatural monopoly and by default should not exist unless there is compelling, scientific evidence, not anecdotes, that patents actually help rather than hinder in every single area of technology where they may be applied.
Particularly since there are vast swathes of ideas that have no patent protection and those areas of technology work just fine. Everything from cooking recipes to math to locating businesses to business organization to artistic ideas to political ideas to ...
The whole patent edifice is based on handwaving about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different (fundamental to deciding whether something is original or not). They can't even cope with the difference between inventing new words and inventing new ideas. The PTO's depth of thinking is atrocious.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
No, no, no. An idea on its own is worth no more than a wish or a prayer. "Wouldn't it be great if..." requires no effort and deserves no reward.
A horseless carriage is an idea. You can't patent that.
But an Otto cycle engine is an implementation of an idea, and that is patentable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."