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USPTO Rejects Many of Oracle's Android Claims
sfcrazy writes "In yet another setback for Oracle, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. Groklaw reports, 'In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent's 21 claims.'"
17 down, tens to hundreds of thousands to go.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Let's see Florian Muller spin this ...
This Is Why We Can Never Have Anything Good Around Here.
Cue Florian trying to spin this with more blatant lies and misinformation!
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
It looks like costly mistakes were made by the USPTO. In a fair world, the original patent examiners should be held personally liable for all of Google's legal fees in this matter. That lesson would most likely make them take a little more care to properly evaluate the next bogus patent application that crosses their desks, before millions of dollars of unnecessary costs are created.
Alternatively, you could say, "USPTO accepts 9 of 14 claims on one patent in the case." Why is this article looking at a single patent and not all? Smells like FUD.
What is really staggering is that under re-examination 90% of claims are rejected based on academic research on the issue. This means 9 out of 10 claims in patents aren't valid.
If a government employee directs a contractor to do work outside of the scope of their contract, the government still has to pay for it. The government then, in turn, bills the employee for the total cost of the work so ordered. There is no limit that I know of to how far the government will bill their employee for the damage; if they cost the government 2500 man hours at the rate of $200/hour, the employee has to reimburse the government to the tune of $500k.
Every year, a handful of government employees find out the hard way that the government still has some accountability here. Yet the system works just fine.
At least in Europe we don't have such nonsense. Mathematic methods and computer programs are simply not patentable inventions.
Liability would never work. The USPTO should require all applicants to post a bond of, say, $10,000 per claim that guarantees the originality of each claim. Then there would be a period of testing time during which a team of challengers who are knowledgeable in the field would be given the opportunity to come up with an invention to satisfy the claims made. If any of the ideas they come up with is substantially similar to the invention in the application, then the challengers get the bounty for whatever claims they invalidated. If the claim challengers don't come up with a substantially similar invention, then the spark of originality is proved, the applicant is refunded their bond(s) and the patent is granted.
It only takes one claim on one patent to become a significant and expensive problem.
Oracle may have had some of it's ability to negotiate for an out of court settlement shot down, but I don't see why this is a win for Google. Fewer claims remain but still the same number of patents in dispute.
Beyond "it's not a loss", can a nice slashdotter enlighten me what this really means?
Patenting software is a tremendous gamble, given the vast and ever-increasing amount of prior art that exists. There is far too much prior art for anyone to be aware of it all. But patent applicants forge on, sometimes rewording claims to obscure the fact that they are obvious or prior art but never giving up on the dream to see their name on an official US government patent and dreaming of all the millions and millions they'll make from the resulting monopoly, only to find their claims rejected and often whole patents voided on reexamination.
Software should not be patentable. Among other reasons, this is a field fraught with traps and pitfalls that even the most experienced cannot help but fall into. Also, it is so risky that patent insurance, if at all available, costs far more than the patent is worth.
me. --a by-product of public education
The business of government is 100% at fault when the business of government issues a bogus patent. It was the executives in the business of government that designed and implemented patent law, not the little guy they hired to do the dirty work.
Somehow manages to make even Microsoft look cool.............
Sun/Oracle gives java away for free. Even if Google has infringed a patent, how has that resulted in any loss of money to Oracle?
The Cake is a Weapon!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Am I the only one who's thinking that someone needs to be asking some senior management at the USPTO about that 80% failure rate?
He'll just suffer Agamemnon's fate and be murdered by his wife and Lieutenant after a triumphant homecoming.
Wasn't the The Odyssey though? (Which is a different Greek story all together?)
As the IRA once said: "You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once."
They only need one claim in one patent to survive to cause a world of hurt.
Sun/Oracle gives java away for free. Even if Google has infringed a patent, how has that resulted in any loss of money to Oracle?
As others have said, it doesn't matter, patents are monopolies backed by force - infringing the monopoly is sufficient.
But don't forget, this isn't about Java at all, it's about forcing Google into a cross-licensing deal on their database technology. Oracle's legacy databases are toast and they know it. SPARC buys them some time, but they really need Google's database patents, so they bought Sun to get Java to hit Google over the head with.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What if Google wins the case and then ports Dalvik to the server and makes a better server JVM implementation of Java than Oracle? Now that would be sweet revenge.
and all implementations of a claim should have to bear the originator's name/credit. Just like (some) OSS software licensing works. :)
We would end up with much less "pro-active patent hording".. and artistic pride would flourish. :) Not to mention putting an end to all the dark trends of patent wars such as genetic/seed and biotech patent battles currently brewing!
Tweeks
Or maybe patent fees should be on a sliding scale. The more you try to patent in a year, the more expensive each application will be. For every application that gets rejected, the next patent will cost you more.
Of course the applicants should pay the examination costs. If it amounts to millions of dollars per patent, so be it. The patents held by "little guys", at least, do not seem to be doing much good to society these days anyways.