Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
How did this get modded "Insightful?"
Here's a quote from the original lawsuit filing from August last year:
(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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
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.
>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.