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USPTO Rejects Many of Oracle's Android Claims

Posted by Soulskill on from the get-outta-here-with-that-nonsense dept.

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.'"

10 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Software Patent Rejections by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..
    1. Re:Software Patent Rejections by c++0xFF · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Correction: 46 down, 122 to go.

      There's seven patents in question, with a total of 168 claims being made. 17 of those claims from one patent were just rejected. Two other patents were also examined with claims rejected. Groklow projects that a total of about 48 claims will survive after all is said and done. After that, the question is how many of those 48 are independent claims.

      Surprising statistic: over 90% of claims are rejected when reexamined. Really?!?

  2. Liability by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Liability by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If patent examiners would be "liable" then you can as well ask that judges should be ...

      What I mean is: if people working for any government agency would be liable (and not the agency or the government) then all those agencies would come to a grinding halt.

      Or even more likely no one would want to work for them ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    2. Re:Liability by Speare · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Personally liable"? What kind of asshole are you? If it's truly an individual examiner's fault, maybe hold them personally accountable, such as a bad mark on their annual performance evaluation. But extracting financial restitution for multi-million dollar damages between two major corporations, from some mid-level technician doing what they thought was their job, is not reasonable. Hyperbole does not help the discourse.

      --
      [ .sig file not found ]
    3. Re:Liability by robot256 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The correct answer is that the organization should absorb the costs and have internal disciplinary rules to penalize or terminate the employees in question. This is what any organization would do if they took the problem seriously.

    4. Re:Liability by Aladrin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Doctors get paid a lot more money. Doctors are virtually forced to buy insurance to cover those liabilities, too.

      If we made the patent examiners individually liable, they would have to also buy insurance, which would mean we'd have to pay them more to cover it. In the end, it doesn't help -us-. It just costs us money.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    5. Re:Liability by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why not? Doctors are held personally liable for their mistakes.

      Hahahahah seriously, you believe that?

      Preface: my wife is a doctor.

      My wife never even SEEs her malpractice insurance bill, the group she works for pays it. Second, assuming they kill a man, intentionally, and its proven in court, the absolute WORST thing that happens to them ... they can't practice medicine again ... IN THAT STATE, they just go somewhere else. Insurance pays the bill. They get boarded in the new state, and go one continuing to be a shitty doctor. Maybe they can't practice in California, because they bother to look at things like that, but thats just California, no body else does (well, no body else where you'd actually want to live, North Dakota and those states might, never bothered looking). The feds really don't give a flying fuck, the state boards are the ones that pull licenses.

      Doctors are no more liable than I am if you shoot your wife. They are supposed to be, but theory and reality are entirely different in most cases, especially this one.

      Doctors are even less liable than drivers. Drivers of cars are required to have insurance as well, but you're a lot more likely to go to jail for doing something stupid in a car than any doctor.

      I've seen doctors get their license revoked for being complete scumbags in our state, literally move their office 2 blocks down the street, to the other side of the state line, and open up for business a week later. We're talking about a doctor who prescribed drugs at levels that were unacceptable to any other doctor, gave out pain pills like there was no tomorrow (I know people who have signed prescription pads from the guy so they could refill themselves.), put people on long term IV antibiotics and destroy their bodies in various ways, and flat out lie about all of it, with video and audio taped evidence ...

      The ONLY, and I do mean ONLY reason he lost his license? The BlueCross and BlueShield were tired of paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient every month. Not because of all the bad shit he was doing, not because he was hurting people, but because the insurance company of patients didn't want to pay anymore.

      The idea that doctors are liable is about as funny as the idea that politicians are liable for what they do.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  3. Re:3... 2.... 1... by Lifyre · · Score: 3, Funny

    That makes correcting the flaws in humanity they represent relatively easy. Take away their food.

    --
    I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
  4. Require originality bonds instead by gregor-e · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.