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Oracle, Google Move To Streamline Java Suit
itwbennett writes "Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion. Earlier this month, lawyers for the two companies gave Judge William Alsup of the US District Court in San Francisco a crash course in Java to prepare him for a claim construction conference."
...the lawyers.
So is a Java suit anything like a Zoot suit? Always wanted one o' them. Will the Gap be selling these?
Programmers will influence the judge because they will be affected by the ruling. Only lawyers can be trusted for total impartiality.
The last time something like this happened, Adobe acquired Macromedia... It's how large guerrilla's get to know each other.
No, its from a technical perspective. /. article
From the linked
Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."
And don't forget FORTRAN programmers. You can't get more impartial about a Java lawsuit than FORTRAN programmers...
-- Sun --
Imagine a box of Smalltalk.
Imagine someone dropping that box in a festering pit of C. (Not all pits of C are festering. This one is.)
Redefine "API" as "buzzword implementation".
Extend according to what the competition's doing, rather than as may be technically appropriate.
-- Google --
Recall how Microsoft made Java incompatible and how nerds all hated it.
Recall that you are Google and all nerds love you.
Do the same thing.
Watch your market grow to Apple levels of hysteria.
Observe Hank Scorpio taking over Java.
Take out the flame retardant lawyers, and, in a scenario looking increasingly Monty Python, use them to teach judges Java. ...
No, its from a technical perspective. From the linked /. article
Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco an overview of Java and why it was invented, and an explanation of terms such as bytecode, compiler, class library and machine-readable code. The tutorial was to prepare him for a claim construction conference in two weeks, where he'll have to sort out disputes between the two sides about how language in Oracle's Java patents should be interpreted. At one point an attorney for Google, Scott Weingaertner, described how a typical computer is made up of applications, an OS and the hardware underneath. 'I understand that much,' Alsup said, asking him to move on. But he had to ask several questions to grasp some aspects of Java, including the concept of Java class libraries. 'Coming into today's hearing, I couldn't understand what was meant by a class,' he admitted."
Not only is it a good idea in general to know what you're talking about, I posit that it should be made illegal to preside over a case unless you understand the basics of what is disputed... As in cases such as this, a brief crash course can be given. A simple quiz about the subject could be given to judges and jurors alike to deem if they are fit to pass judgment.
Additionally, I think the patent system should also apply this methodology to their examiners. Clearly, the examiner that allowed the "swinging on swing sideways" patent application to be granted in 2002 was not properly educated about the common use of swings in general... A bit of education in this respect could have saved lots of tax payer dollars spent on the re-examination and subsequent invalidation of the bogus "business method" patent.
Computer Science and software engineering are rife with themes. Many so-called inventions and 'new' ideas are applying these tried and true themes to a new permutation of some old problem. For instance, folding two loops together to reap stale items in a hash-table while simultaneously doing a query by iterating across a bucket list (a previous but recent slashdot patent posting). You can tell someone (a Judge) what JIT is, that it effectively combines caching of already-compiled code with partial compilation, but he can't appreciate that software engineering and computer science are pervaded by the concepts of caching, and right-sizing work. He can't possibly appreciate how obvious some of these 'inventions' are, and rank them fairly on a scale of truly inventive (LZW in my opinion) to 'someone-skilled-in-the-art-could-do-that' (twiddling bits in FAT to support short file-names). I think this is in general the primary source of frustration for engineers and scientists: that judges and patent clerks who really have no good sense of taste or knowlege on the matter make such important decisions. Redhat pointed out once that in the _vast_ majority of patent suits, the person being sued is never accused of actually _reading_ the patent, but infringing accidentally. People don't read software patents, so their claimed benefit of being able to publish great ideas by protecting them for the inventor is just bunk: society eats the bar while the inventor is anomolously protected for really no reason. They are basically landmines that only rich or organized people can buy, and most of the community knows it. Giving judges crash courses in Java is a promising start, but its also a depressing reminder of how far we have to go.
--"You are your own God"--