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Oracle's Android Claims Cut By 98%
tomhudson writes "Groklaw is reporting that Oracle was ordered to reduce its claims against Google from 132 to 3. In a further ruling, the judge has ordered that 129 of those claims will be permanently barred against all past and current products. Additionally, the judge has asked both sides if, in their opinion, after they have reduced the number of claims, a trial is still worth holding, or if the case is now moot."
please promote this judge to advise higher up!
Which bit don't you get? Oracle made 132 claims of infringement by Google on their patents. Those 132 claims involved only 7 patents (ie. many of the claims involved the same patents). Google responded by claiming the patents were invalid, citing hundreds of examples of prior art that meant the patents should not have been granted in the first place.
Only 3 Oracle claims left? Only a few days ago I heard about Oracles proposal to reduce the number of claims to 30, and Google's counter proposal to reduce them to 20. 3 seems rather extreme, doesn't it?
I just hope it helps rather than hurts Google's attempt to invalidate all those patents.
So, "132 claims from seven patents" just means that Oracle claimed that Android was infringing on an average of 18 claims per patents (...which were very probably very similar to each other, differing only in scope...)
Google tried to have these claims struck by pointing out prior art (implementations that would infringe, but were actually done prior to the patent, thus showing that the patent (... or rather: the relevant claims...) was not really novel...), and found hundreds of them.
Then the judge told both parties to "keep it simple" by only sticking to the most relevant claims and defences.
A court order making sense? ObL found, nuclear reactors are now officially not 100% safe, the greens party wins an election in germany, the second british prince marries a common woman, canada has a new government, atlas shrugged the movie is out, the middle east struggling for freedom...
2012 must truly bring the end of the world as we know it.
i call collusion. lawyers on both sides just wanted to get the judge to say "moot" cause it sounds funny. "Moot." hehehe. Try it. "Moot".
rewriting history since 2109
That russian doll is called 'matrushka'.
Basically they were told to sum up the most important points.
Example (nothing to do with TFA or the case):
Party 1 has a patent on mousebuttonhighlighting (pretty lame, but caffeine level is currently to low) and sues Party 2 for using said technique, stating each and every page ever produced by 2 as evidence
Party 2 then states that Party 1 should never had gotten the patent in the first place, filing each and every web page using said technique before patent was granted (prior art) as evidence
Judge says: OK kids, you both get to choose your most important points and the rest of that crap goes into the waste bin (no recycling allowed). If, after you are forced to think about the stuff you unloaded on my table, you still think it is worth talking about, we can go to court.
Did I forget anything important?
Telling Google they have to pick and choose what they can use to defend themselves isn't kosher.
Google don't need to defend themselves against the claims that have been thrown out.
This isn't about deciding who is right, at this stage, its about cutting the case down to something that can be heard, considered properly and decided before the heat death of the universe.
Also, its not the Judge's job to get as many patent claims overturned as possible, much as we'd like that to happen.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It is not that 3 stuck: the judge has not decided which 3 claims stick. He has ordered both sides to reduce their claims and defences from the current huge number in three stages, to be down to 3/8 by the time the case comes to trial. The idea is that Oracle should pick their three strongest claims, and Google their eight best defences against those claims. This means that there is at least a chance that the jury will be able ti understand the case without their brains exploding,
It was announced that groklaw will stop on may 16, What site will be the best followup?
Way off-topic here, but 'communism has never been practiced' is another way of saying that it doesn't work, since it has been attempted a lot of times. And it's not even true. Communism works quite well, the problem is that it doesn't scale. Once you get beyond about 50 people in your society, communism starts to develop serious issues.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Google don't need to defend themselves against the claims that have been thrown out.
The judge not only threw out claims, but also some of Google's prior art examples.
Judges in US courts are the judge of law. It is their job to decide how the law applies to a case and make sure legal standards of evidence are met. So that also means they can dismiss things and prevent them from coming back. This same thing can happen in a criminal case. A judge can determine that the evidence is insufficient to go to trial, and that something has tainted it and thus bar the charge from going forward.
Judges are supposed to get rid of things before it goes to the jury. The jury is just the judge of fact. Everything presented to them is supposed to have met all legal standards, they are just there to decide what is true or not.
In the case of civil trials, a lot of things often get thrown out since plaintiffs often make shitloads of claims. In a criminal trial the prosecution must have one theory of the case. That theory could potentially change based on new evidence, but they can't present a bunch of alternate scenarios and try to play pick n' choose. However in a civil trial the plaintiff may present a whole bunch of claims, and likewise the defense may present a whole bunch of defenses.
Some of these can be pretty stupid, and they'll get culled pretrial.
This appears to be the legal system working as intended. If you don't like it, you are probably going to have to look for another country as it is pretty well set in its ways in the US.
I was shocked for a moment....
I received 132 emails for little blue pills. All it took was for me to click on one of them!
Ah, Communism -- The One True Scotsman of political philosophy.
Patents have the same problem. They may work well with single inventors inventing steam engines and telephones, but it doesn't scale well to multinational pharma and software companies.
Check your own link, it's Matryoshka, not "Matrushka". :)
It's a word normally written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Do you really think it has a canonical representation in the Latin alphabet?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now I learned about why MKV files were named the way it was.
Here's my understanding of the progression:
Near as I can see, this is a big win for Google - they've essentially won on 129 points by default, and can concentrate their resources on the remaining three.
The same link mentions matrioshka (brain); also points to... Just for a start (and version of parent poster could easily result from just being a native speaker of some Slavic language or even local dialect of Russian, influencing his chosen form of romanization)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Actually, the judge isn't throwing out anything. He's telling Oracle "You will throw out most of these. Pick three you like." And he's telling Google "Most of this is going away. Pick 8 that you like once you know the three Oracle is going to be using." Oracle will of course pick the three that they think are the strongest, but Google can pick their 8 strongest defenses against those three.