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Oracle Sues Lodsys For Patent Trolling
RWarrior(fobw) writes "PJ reports at Groklaw that Oracle has sued well-known patent troll Lodsys, asking for declaratory judgement in the Eastern District of Texas that Oracle and its customers don't need Lodsys licenses, and that Lodsys patents are invalid anyway. 'It seems that Lodsys has been going after Oracle customers, and they in turn have been asking Oracle to indemnify them. Lodsys, methinks, has made a mistake. One doesn't go after Oracle's money. No. No. Never a good plan. I suspect Oracle will go for damages, tripled, and all their expenses, legal fees, etc. when this is over.' PJ also points out that which companies are the good guys and which are the bad guys depends on which case you're looking at. "
Whom do I cheer for now?
-------
1. Enjoy your job
2. Make lots of money
3. Work within the law
Choose any two.
I mean, Oracle did just basically lose a huge patent troll case over a freely available API implementation...
Avoid patent trolls,
And that lawfare schtick,
Like facial moles,
Lest one suffer a prick.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Forgive me for being dense, but "I suspect Oracle will go for damages, tripled" seems silly - can you sue for damages in a preemptive lawsuit, giving that you are technically the defendant?
From the groklaw article.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Lodsys is the troll that went after iOS developers for in-app purchases, even though Apple had already licensed the rights to that patent on behalf of their developers. It's not exactly surprising to see that they'd try the same thing with Oracle, nor is it surprising to see that Oracle is following Apple's lead in trying to intervene on behalf of the smaller guys. After all, taking on the big companies is hard, but if you can target their customers or users, you can oftentimes win. Lodsys seems to have made a business of doing so.
I was under the impression that U.S. law was still unsettled regarding the ability to patent software.
But if that were true, I would have expected at least *one* patent lawsuit in recent years make headlines by claiming that software patents were invalid, and getting a ruling on that issue.
Anyone know where we're at with this?
The Supreme Court has implied that software patents are valid, if they're not directed to an abstract idea. In some contexts, that can mean that they transform matter from one state to another, in others it can mean that they're tied to a machine. In still others... well, we don't know. That's where we're at.
Basically, they're tiptoeing around, trying to figure out how to say what they really want to say, which is that patent claims can't be valid if you can infringe them purely by thinking, because that creates a thoughtcrime. It's like back when they said that you can't get a patent on a law of nature, such as E=MC^2, or A=GM/r^2: what they never came right out and said, but seems to be hinted at by all sorts of decisions, is that if you could, you could get an injunction to make people stop being bound by gravity, or not use energy, or whatnot - or, rather, that you could require every person in the world to pay you royalties. Similarly, if you got a patent on thinking that 2+2=4, or realizing that an elevated level of compound A indicates a patient has disease B, then you could force someone to pay royalties simply for thinking. It's the old "don't think of a pink elephant... too late." So, currently, they want to see some affirmative actions, performed by a machine at the direction of a user, in the patent claims. You can't infringe just by thinking, you actually have to take some steps.
This says nothing about novelty (35 USC 102) or obviousness (35 USC 103). Those are different statutes... The above is just about whether a claimed process - even the most novel, nonobvious process in the history of the universe - is patent eligible or not.
The only odd part is that when accused infringers take this preemptive shot, they usually don't do it in the Eastern District of Texas. It's actually one of the reasons to file first when someone hints at a lawsuit - you get to choose where to go.
Just because Oracle was wrong doesn't make them a troll, by most common definitions of a troll anyway. Even though Oracle's case was idiotic for so many reasons that have already been beaten to death, at least they actually make stuff. They lost their idiotic case, so at least to some degree the system sorta-kinda worked. From their prospective, they did what they did to protect their own stuff.
Lodsys, on the other hand, doesn't make anything. They do what they do, not to protect their own stuff, but for the sole purpose of suing people. Worse yet, they go after the users (at least Oracle went after Google, not everyone with a phone) who they know don't have the resources to defend themselves. They are using the so-called justice system for extortion. That they even exist is a clear sign that the justice system is horribly broken. Oracle is like the mentally retarded Lenny who happens to murder somebody who was in his path out of uncontrolled stupidity (still an evil act), while Lodsys is like Freddy Krueger, whose sole purpose of existence is to murder people in their sleep.
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy.
No more. No less.