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Dispute Damages Would Exceed Android Revenues
CWmike writes "A new document in a year-old patent lawsuit filed by Oracle against Google over Android intellectual property suggests Oracle could be seeking huge damages from Google. The damages owed to Oracle, if granted by federal Judge William Alsup for the US District Court for Northern California, would 'far exceed any money Google has ever earned with Android' and could lead to a rewrite of Android's Dalvik virtual machine, considered integral to Android and used by Android device manufacturers and potentially thousands of Android app developers, wrote one blogger, Florian Mueller, who writes about intellectual property issues involving the software industry."
Florian is not a blogger, he is a professional troll.
Kind of makes me wonder why Google didn't buy Sun.
Better known as 318230.
You can remove whatever you like from Android. Removing whatever you like from actual marketed phones, on the other hand...
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Florian Mueller blog is a fake. Some call this astroturfing. All he does is spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about Android (Linux). His blog was setup for journalists to point to because journalists have to point to other sources of information for their articles. And it seems to be working because I have seen CNN and other news outlets point to it. Shame on you CNN.
Only guessing here, but Florian seems to be paid by Microsoft somehow to say these things. He even has written against IBM for the sake of Microsoft crushing IBM's mainframe business.
His blog is misnamed - it should read what his intentions are - Anti-FOSS Blog.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Clean room implementations generally protect you from copyright infringement. From a legal perspective, patents are a different beast altogether. If I hold a valid patent, your independent invention of the patented device/algorithm/whatever infringes. The only way you get to legally use that independent invention is to either (a) invalidate my patent or (b) get a license from me.
Can we have a "florian mueller" tag, and something to filter out articles tagged "florian mueller"?
It should.
Being able to "re-invent" something should nullify a patent completely.
Patents are like nuclear weapons and should be created and deployed accordingly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If a patent is going to be valid, it's going to be specific enough that workarounds or alternative solutions could exist. You don't patent having solved a problem. You patent the way you solved it.
Now, back to the real world, yeah, it's entirely possible that a rewrite of Dalvik may be pointless. We'll see.
Another entry to add to the "Virtues of Ad-Blockers" list. Not only does it speed up browsing and get rid of most of the crap, it also makes society a better place by not feeding revenue to the trolls. It's a win-win!
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So many story summaries now are oversensalized, with many stories that are more like advertisements.
It seems it's all about page hits and controversy.
"News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" is long gone.
Too often the *Editors* can't be bothered to even edit or check stories before posting them.
It should.
And with that comment, you prove that you don't understand what patents are all about. The whole point of patents is to make it easy to re-invent a process/product. Patents are trying to keep us away from the days of guilds--everything is a trade secret, and no-one cooperates. Instead, the inventor gets an economic incentive (17 years of monopoly) in exchange for opening up their work.
Sadly, you have acurately described the proprietary software industry -- yep, despite the bogus patent laws, it's still a "guild" -- Membership dues are patent litigation and/or cross licensing (which can be bought with enough buckets of money).
Now, whether software should be patentable is up for debate, as is a valid length of a software patent, assuming software is patentable (17 years is pretty close to forever in software time). But copyright and patents cover two different things--with copyright, you're protecting a way of expressing an idea, and with patents, you're protecting the idea itself. And if you really think you can "clean room" invent an idea, think about what that means before answering.
I don't think "up for debate" is a good way to put it, unless you know of any patent offices re-evaluating or questioning the validity of software patents; Why would they invalidate them all and lose the revenue stream it affords them?
Should they be invalid, yes. Software is math. Math can not be patented. Somehow we allowed "Math" in a computer machine to be patented because the PTOs were to dumb to realize that the "computing machine" is just an extension of my pencil & paper, or mind. It's a math concept visualizer (like paper), and since you can't patent "Math" on Paper, or in stone or scrawled on the side of a bridge, you shouldn't be able to patent it in a computer. The first "computers" were people -- Building a machine to do what a human does should not prevent humans from being able to do it, yet this is what software patents (Math executed via machine) do.
Allow patents for the math visualizer machines themselves, but not for the math that we feed them.
P.S. Ever hear the term "Paperless" ? How are we to achieve this goal if the new digital medium is patentable where paper was not?
Well if we are adding to the list of trolls we shouldn't have linked to /. for ANY reason, can I add a couple? If I never see another "article" by Steven J Nichols and Paul Thurott I would be quite happy, thanks ever so. Nichols and Thurott are two sides of the same coin, Nichols the "Will (insert topic of the day) (kill/crush/destroy) (Linux/FOSS/The GPL)?" and Thurott is such a shill he actually had the brass troll balls to say Vista was great, stable AND low resource. Right Paul, because i forgot what fun it was to have to reboot a dozen times a day because the &*&^$^$ OS keeps forgetting how to access shared folders. I also loved the "feature" where I couldn't download while listening to music without everything slowing to a crawl. that was nice.
So while Florian is a pretty irritating little shit (and no I won't RTFA since his name is on it, I'm sure its his usual troll bait trying to get page views) frankly he is little league compared to pro trolls like Thurott and Nichols. Hell I would rather sit down to one of Twitter's rants on how it is all a MSFT conspiracy, at least THOSE were entertaining and unpredictable, he had a knack for going six degrees and being able to blame ANYTHING on MSFT. Thurott, Nichols, and Florian are just the same tired old shilling and baiting for page views, same shit different day. Yawn.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I suggest that geeks world wide place a special logo with the words "End Overly-Broad Patents" on every website or mobile service one has any legal control over, such as personal blogs, non-profit wiki's etc. Time to stand up to nonsense; it's keeping us in the dark ages.
Table-ized A.I.