After Android Trial, Google Demands $4M From Oracle

MikeatWired writes "Google is seeking $4 million from Oracle to cover the costs it incurred during this spring's epic legal battle over the Android mobile operating system, reports Caleb Garling. In a brief filed in federal court on Thursday night, Google lead counsel Robert Van Nest argued that Oracle is required to pay his company's legal costs because judge and jury ruled in favor of Google on almost every issue during the six-week trial. 'Google prevailed on a substantial part of the litigation,' read Google's brief. '[Oracle] recovered none of the relief it sought in this litigation. Accordingly, Google is the prevailing party and is entitled to recover costs.' Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case."

Comments

WTF

[nickybio]

2.9 million in copying? I think I want to die.

Re:WTF

[hawguy]

2.9 million in copying?

I think I want to die.

97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.

Re:WTF

[arekin]

97 million documents, 10 cents a page, thats what they get for copying everything at kinkos...

Re:WTF

[Tough Love]

It is apparent that you have never hired a lawyer.

Re:WTF

[bertok]

97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!

So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

It is apparent that you have never hired a lawyer.

These guys track and bill for every individual copy, fax and scan. It's pretty retarded hooking this shit up to the copier also(the counter machine), but they're the only ones that use them. They also are still in love with faxing things, they live in the 70's.

Re:WTF

[TreyGeek]

This and a comment a few notches below reminds me of a story an old professor at my university told in an ethics class. He was an expert witness at trial where a state inspector was run over by a 'modern' paving machine. The defense lawyers requested a copy of the source code for the firmware in the machine. They came into the office one day to find on their fax machine pages and pages of printouts of the crap produced from opening the executable in Word. The executable, not the source code! Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.

Re:WTF

[Mr0bvious]

I think you meant $2.7M not $97M (I expect a typo) it was 97M documents, which could have each contained X pages.

There's more than just drag and drop the document folder - that probably included the labour of all the finding/sorting/sifting. I also know little to nothing about the legal system they were operating in, but it might be necessary to provide printed copies of these document - that would really start to add up. $2.7M is probably fair if that is the case.

Re:WTF

[ari_j]

Those 97 million pages didn't review, organize, and where necessary redact themselves. It doesn't matter what technology you use, if you care at all about the content it is expensive to deal with that many pages of written material. It's like proof-reading an early but complete draft of Atlas Shrugged 89,000 times over except with a subtle plot and only slightly better prose. It comes out to only $32.53 per reading of Atlas Shrugged, which is a better price than I would offer.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

So, yeah, $97M is a bit much.

I assume you mean $2.9 million?

Well, Oracle lost.

it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man!

No, this should be the punishment for a company that looses. Do you think that a company should be able to come up to you and request MILLIONS of documents? Do you think a company should come up to you send you legal request after legal request for documents? So what if fits on $50 hard drive? It's the labor to go through the 20 million pages. You don't want to be giving out the wrong pages that have something valuable on it not related that Oracle could steal. If the "Common Man" could read a PAGE PER SECOND every second of every day and NEVER EVER SLEEP it would take him 231 days to go through all that.

Doesn't seem like any company should just be able to to do this without repercussion to me. That would make justice impossible for the common man.

Re:WTF

[nickybio]

I have. That's what makes me cringe. I guess they got a deal at $0.03/page though. They must have paid students to do the copying because my lawyer charged me hundreds just for talking on the phone!

Re:WTF

[hawguy]

97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!

So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?

yYou've ignored that they are asking for $2.9M, not $97M.

Now, looking at the $2.9M figure, you're ignoring the labor costs -- you're paying someone to review and organize the docs (and either copy them or categorize them into some document management system). Assuming you're paying someone who actually knows something about software or the case, i think $30/hour is reasonable. You can pay $20/hour for an administrative assistant to a temp agency.

If they can review a document and sort it appropriately in 10 seconds, that's 360 documents/hour. $30/hour / 360 docs/hour = 8.3 cents/document. Since many documents (i.e. source code files) are probably multiple pages long, 3 cents/document sounds reasonable. You'd probably pay an agency around 10 cents/page to scan a document. Plus 2 or 3 cents for printed docs.

Re:WTF

[Warhawke]

I commend you for inventing my new favorite unit of measurement. "You'll find the average homework for this law class to measure around 2.3 AS per night." So what's the conversion rate for Atlas Shruggeds to Fountainheads?

Re:WTF

[citizenr]

2.9 million in copying?

I think I want to die.

97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.

I want to be paid 3 cents per GREPped page

Re:WTF

[ari_j]

What's the ratio of negative infinity to negative infinity?

Re:WTF

[adamchou]

when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.

don't always assume that what they're doing is out of ignorance.

a friend of mine works for a boutique patent firm suing a larger company for violating their patent. when they asked for the source to a program that produces a ~30 line output, the larger company sent 10 gigs of source code, historic source code, accompanying documents, and other crap and told them to sift through it to find it. on top of that, they only had a month or so to go through all of it.

my point is, sometimes, its a stall tactic to drive up costs and or to just add unnecessary complications for the other side

Re:WTF

[hawguy]

The executable, not the source code!

Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.

Don't blame it on the lawyers not having common sense -- blame on it them having an abundance of common sense when it comes to exploiting loopholes to protect their clients. I once worked for a company that was shutting down and the lead investor wanted the source code he "owned". My boss and the corporate attorney (who were interested in resurrecting the company) wanted to give him everything he was owed without giving him what he really "wanted", so they had me send them the complete source code history out of CVS in printed form (yes, before the days of SVN and Git) - this was thousands of pages of nearly unusable source code since rewriting the whole thing was probably less work that transcribing it from printouts.

In the end everyone was happy, my boss got his company back, and the lead investor eventually got a nice return on his investment.

Re:WTF

[mwvdlee]

US$ 2.9 million in copying? That's only like 3 or 4 MP3's.

Re:WTF

[drkstr1]

1.

Re:WTF

[k(wi)r(kipedia)]

97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.

That's right about the cost per page of a pretty decent personal printer. I know, only a fool would bother printing 97M pages for a court case. But maybe that's just Google's out-of-season April Fool's Joke for Oracle.

Re:WTF

[Ironhandx]

Theres just one problem there. The legal system hasn't caught up with the tech and since documents need to be independently verifiable as well as unchanging, print is still the only reliable format.

So we have A) The law hasn't really caught up to the use of electronic documents and B) the tech doesn't exist that would ALLOW the law to catch up. Not that it would take much to create something but its a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

Re:WTF

[__aaltlg1547]

More reasonably it's really more the labor of paying lawyers and techies to go through mountains of documents, review their content and decide what is relevant. That's expensive and can't be automated.

Re:WTF

[Hognoxious]

I once sent a minitab worksheet (or whatever they're called) to the printer instead of invoking some command and sending the output from that. The thing did everything short of catching fire before someone killed it.

Re:WTF

[rtaylor]

Deal. But if you expose any material not related to the case through improper redacting you will be held liable for any losses incurred over a 10 year span.

Re:WTF

[bertok]

That's just totally false.

Print is trivially forge-able. Literally, children can do it! Haven't you ever heard of some snotty kid altering their grade report so they wouldn't get punished by their parents?

Meanwhile, a digital signature can be made so robust that nothing short of revolutionary new mathematics could be used to alter the data in any way.

On top of that, there are entirely new kinds of things that can be done with digital data, that's just impossible with print.

For example, escrow: It would be possible for a defendant to collect everything, and I mean *everything* that they have, encrypt and sign the data, and then hand it over. This ensures that the prosecution has a snapshot available at a point in time, before the defendant has had time to create forgeries. Then, based on the Judge's rulings, sections of the data can be unlocked and verified by providing the private keys for those sections at a later point. The prosecution, or the Judge, or whoever, can hold the data in escrow, without the defendant having to disclose anything unless required. However, no matter how long the legal process takes, the defendant won't have weeks or months to alter the originals, because they already handed over a snapshot at the very beginning.

Digital is not just "not inferior" to print, it's vastly superior in every way. It's cheaper to store, cheaper to copy, and trivial to search. I can be digitally signed, encrypted, and timestamped. None of that is possible with print.

I bet many people in the legal profession are smart enough to understand this. I bet that all of those in that subset are also smart enough to realize that they can continue to charge their exorbitant fees if they keep using antiquated dead-tree methods instead of modernizing.

Re:WTF

[Nemyst]

I know this was supposed to be funny, but the "Informative" mod is depressing.

Infinity/Infinity is undefined, just like 0/0 and Infinity/0.

Re:WTF

[michael_cain]

There are a couple of old stories told about the government's antitrust case against IBM (eventually dropped). In the first, the government subpoenaed a list of documents. IBM said they would comply, and a few weeks later three tractor-trailer rigs pulled up at the DOJ with copies of the documents, in boxes in random order. In the second, the DOJ decided that it needed to buy a document management system to organize all the documentation it received from IBM as part of the case. The only system available at that time that was big enough to handle the volume was sold by... IBM.

Re:WTF

[michael_cain]

It's always a fun day when you arrive at work and the company lawyers have put yellow crime-scene tape across your doorway, along with a notice that they'll be spending the day going through your paper files and making a copy of your hard disk(s). There were two amusing incidents that day. They could copy the disk in the company-supplied Windows laptop without any problem; the headless Linux boxes in the little rack in the corner gave them fits. When they got to the locked file drawer where I kept stuff provided by potential vendors under NDA, I told them that they weren't on the list of people authorized to see those documents. The legal department spent all day resolving that one internally, and eventually decided to skip that drawer.

Re:WTF

[nurb432]

You neglect to include the cost of the actual copy/scan/print, and not just storage. Plus depending on the documents, there may have been fees to get access to them in the first place. ( for similar reasons ). Storage is NOT the biggest cost.

There are humans doing this and they like to eat too.

Re:WTF

[bertok]

You really need to read up on digital signatures! Archival formats too. I'm not talking about computer programs, I'm talking about data. Just about anything that would be relevant to a court case could be easily converted into something like PDF/A. While you're at it, keep going and read about trusted timestamping as well before you accuse others of ignorance.

You're thinking of a digital copy as a "fancy" paper copy, and hence you're confusing the pure digital data (an abstract mathematical description of something), with the medium it is stored in (disk, flash, computer, program, whatever). It's not "electronic paper" I'm talking about. Digital data has properties that are totally independent of the medium it is stored in. In fact, the medium doesn't matter at all, and that's the beauty of it.

If someone gives provides me with, say, a 1TB hard disk full of data -- any data -- and I get a checksum of it with a cryptographic hash like SHA-2, then there is literally no practical way for anyone to make any change whatsoever to that data without me being able to detect it later. It would be borderline impossible. The wrong-doer would literally have to revolutionize discrete mathematics first, and then would probably still require a computer the size of the entire planet. The properties of the specific disk drive are irrelevant. The same bits could have been originally stored on tape, or thumb drive, or be sent via email. Bits are just numbers, and numbers don't change because of the material they are written down onto.

It doesn't matter if the data was then circulated through thirty seedy servers in formerly communist countries for months before the trial. If it matches the checksum, then it is the same data. Exactly the same. Down to the last bit. If it doesn't match, then it has been altered. End of story. No need for a chain of custody, no need for oversight, no need for anything at all but a short number.

This is how Bittorrent works, by the way. You don't have to trust your peers! They can send you as many virus-infected blocks of data as they want, but it won't matter, because the Bittorrent client can verify the data it receives against a checksum and reject altered blocks. This is how a huge network of unknown people can work towards a common goal (sharing files), despite active attackers desperately trying to bring the system down from the inside.

Meanwhile, with paper, you have to trust people. People cheat. People make mistakes. People get bribed to do all sorts of nefarious things. Not only that, but the process of copying things with paper is glacially slow, slow enough to give wrongdoers plenty of time to alter things. For comparison, instead of months of "discovery", it would be quite practical to get a complete copy of all of the data a corporation has in a matter of minutes (their backup tapes), and then checksum it all in a few hours. Just printing it out would take weeks, months, or even years.

Re:WTF

[jaymz666]

I bet that that was on purpose. Let's send them as much as possible so they have to work for days/weeks/months to find what they actually asked for inside that mess.

Re:WTF

[jaymz666]

You mean like Lars Ulrich did with printouts of napster usernames and filenames?

Re:WTF

[cduffy]

They also are still in love with faxing things, they live in the 70's.

Probably for the same reason doctors use fax machines for sending prescriptions and patient data around but not email.

Faxes have a legal presumption of security, and intercepting them (specifically!) is a crime with fairly stiff penalties... whereas sending something around by unencrypted email means you're liable if it leaks.

Re:WTF

[Gil-galad55]

It's more correct to say it's an indeterminate form, and what it evaluates to depends on what's under your infinity's hood. Two examples:

lim x--> inf of x/x is "infinity/infinity" and evaluates to 1.

lim x--> inf of e^x/x is also "infinity/infinity" but evaluates to infinity.

Re:WTF

[Ironhandx]

You still don't understand.

You are inherently trusting the initial seeder. If the initial seeder put up blocks that are infected, then you get infected. The initial source is exactly who the courts very often CANNOT trust and still have a fair and just legal system.

I am aware of ALL of the technologies that you are describing but NONE of them counteract the one problem that is stopping it. You can digitally sign, encrypt and time stamp your fucking heart off. All of it is either irrelevant or exploitable. There is no such thing as an entirely secure electronic document, no where near the security offered by a paper copy and a vault. You can MD5 or SHA-2 sum an HDD all you want, if the data has already been altered on an SSD you'll just know that the data that is there is the same as it was when it was handed to the court. If you were to do something like this with source code you would have to have someone independantly verify the code and then ensure that nothing at all happened to it in between verification and delivery. The trigger could even be built into a device to do it as soon as an SHA-2 sum is run. Then every following copy of that data is both verified and not legitimate. The paper copy can be verified and signed off on. Duplicating the signature down to the point where forensics can't detect it is much less trivial than hacking a flash drive to run its own custom code. Besides which PDF and other formats are so exploitable that you can literally have the file install a process that just corrupts the whole process, have the SHA-2 return a value that matches a changed file and change the file at the same time, etc.

P.S. They already do the taking of corporate data immediately. It is only in a police raid situation where they can actually trust the data. It is only in civil proceedings where they are -SOMETIMES- allowed to voluntarily hand over information, because the civil court is a tiny bit more trusting(wrongly so IMO).

When you're talking about big money, electronics are not the best thing to trust. Everything is exploitable. The only safe computer on the planet is one that is unplugged, put in a 8 m3 block of concrete and buried 20 feet under, and even that one isn't completely safe.

Now, I'm not saying your practices don't have their place. I totally agree with them being used, but they need to be used in addition to the traditional paper methods, not in place of.

Re:WTF

[Ironhandx]

Sigh, logical fail in third paragraph, everything until "The trigger" should be ignored. I'll fix it later.

Re:WTF

[tolkienfan]

The word you're looking for is loses not looses.

Re:WTF

[cornjones]

You are already trusting the initial seeder. In your example, the court asks Company A to hand over its documents. Company A is the initial seeder. Just because the docs are printed doesn't make them any less susceptible to being altered before they are handed over.

Now, once they are handed over, your argument says that it would be better to have forensic verification done on them at each stage when they are used to verify they haven't been altered? Seriously?

I agree w/ the grandparent, math is much harder to fool than a forensic analysis. Besides, there is no way you are going to do a manual forensic analysis on that many documents.

Re:WTF

[Ironhandx]

You really want to trust a government that can't even keep its own damaging secrets secure with the security of evidence?

Besides that a cursory forensic analysis is stupidly easy and would like involve automated software checking of individual pages against original electronic copies. Its called multi-layer authentication that includes a physical component. What the GP is saying is we should do away with paper altogether, which we should definitely not.

Re:WTF

[cornjones]

have you ever used a computer? seriously, here is a 1000 page paper manuscript and a 1000 page text file. find the misspelling... that is basically what we are talking about.

you rail against trusting the gov't but the electronic copy is infinitely more trustable b/c you can show without a shadow of a doubt, whether the document has been modified since delivery. Paper will not _ever_ be able to show you the same thing.

I do like multi layer ( usually called defense in depth, or did the buzz word move on) but are you really talking about taking physical copies, scanning them, ocr ing them and comparing them to the electronic copies? gah, we have a well developed field of mathematics that does this very well... bertok is dead right on this one. far more accurate than ocring would be (things get messy in teh physical world).

this is coming, likely it will end up coming down as a cost cutting measure and we can accept the change b/c it is sooo much better.

I hope Google gets that $4mil

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's the principle that matters!

Re:I hope Google gets that $4mil

[Qwavel]

Well, for starters I'm sure that $4m is actually a small fraction of their actual legal costs.

In some cases, the losing side will just cover the administrative costs - it's possible that the summary is wrong and this is the case here.

Otherwise, Google has decided to super low ball their estimate for some reason.

Re:I hope Google gets that $4mil

[CrimsonAvenger]

In some cases, the losing side will just cover the administrative costs - it's possible that the summary is wrong and this is the case here.

The summary is wrong.

What is being covered is stuff like copying documents, having to pay to produce three different damages reports since Oracle couldn't be bothered to follow the Judge's instructions on the damages report the first two times (actually, they didn't follow them ANY of the times, but the Judge gave up after three tries)....

A cheaper alternative

[ardmhacha]

"Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case.""

Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.

Re:A cheaper alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but the justice system demands stuff to be written on dead trees...

Re:A cheaper alternative

[the eric conspiracy]

They did. It would have been a lot more to search 97 million documents by hand.

Re:A cheaper alternative

[hawguy]

"Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case.""

Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.

I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)

Re:A cheaper alternative

[martin-boundary]

$2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents

Nevermind that! I think I just saw a RIAA lawyer raise his head from a prey, and prick up his ears...

Re:A cheaper alternative

[jd2112]

They did. It would have been a lot more to search 97 million documents by hand.

If only Google had access to technology for indexing and searching vast amounts of documents and displaying the results in, say, a Web browser.

Re:A cheaper alternative

[ChunderDownunder]

Yes, software patents accelerate climate change.

Petition presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to abolish them on environmental grounds? :)

Re:A cheaper alternative

[datavirtue]

No.

Re:A cheaper alternative

[gl4ss]

for _processing_ what should be submitted and processing how it's going to be used as evidence however..

besides, submitting a hd should have been enough. it's enough to use as evidence against people in criminal cases so why the fuck not here?

Re:A cheaper alternative

[Rich0]

Perhaps, but they still have to read all those documents to ensure that they're:

1. Everything they were ordered by the court to produce.
2. Not more than the court ordered them to produce.
3. Accurate, official versions, etc.
4. Not out-of-context.

It isn't like they're going to just point their search engine at their entire internal network and give Oracle access to it to go fishing.

Re:A cheaper alternative

[Branciforte]

Well, try to come up with a search query line that does something like this: "all documents about Java but only those that relate to this case and do not reveal company secrets that are not relavant to the case".

Interesting...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It, unfortunately, isn't a huge surprise that some fairly epic paper-shuffling(and converting to TIFF, apparently) took place.

What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...

Re:Interesting...

[Tough Love]

Forensic data analysis is a specialized niche, not something you want to throw an intern at.

Re:Interesting...

[datavirtue]

wow

Re:Interesting...

[crankyspice]

What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...

Not that surprising. I haven't gone through the PACER docket for this case to check, but I'd be extremely surprised if a stipulated protective order wasn't in place, one that permitted document production to be designated 'Attorney's Eyes Only' for commercially sensitive (etc.) documents. Google themselves wouldn't be able to handle the search and digitization of any such material; their lawyers would have had to have outsourced that (or done it internally, much more expensive)...

Re:Interesting...

[Tough Love]

You have a rather wide eyed take on Google's abilities. Hint: if you have a PhD and you're that smart, you're more than smart enough to avoid being assigned such a menial task.

Re:Interesting...

[gshegosh]

If they did it on their own, it would be much harder to proove the real cost of it.

97 million documents?

[Trogre]

Forget Google - if even 1 percent of those 97 million documents actually needed to be printed out for this case then the entire freaking planet should sue Oracle and make them plant a new rainforest

Re:97 million documents?

[Samantha Wright]

There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. They vary in their conclusions from about 8,000 sheets up to 100,000, mostly because they use different trees to start with. Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre of rainforest. I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.

We can then derive other fanciful metrics, like how many species are being destroyed in the process (as many Amazonian plants and animals have extremely small habitats.)

Re:97 million documents?

[datavirtue]

1.2 Shamans were killed in the litigation of this case.

Re:97 million documents?

[LordLucless]

I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, all paper is made from either recycled sources, or managed plantations. All lumber should be as well, but there are frequent allegations to the contrary.

Re:97 million documents?

[VortexCortex]

There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. ... I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.

Wait, why are you inventing a new system? Just use the established unit of measure everyone is already familiar with: Libraries of Congress.

Re:97 million documents?

[Hope Thelps]

Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre

How many pages are you assuming per document?

Re:97 million documents?

[Samantha Wright]

No one whines when you raze Libraries of Congress!

Re:97 million documents?

[Samantha Wright]

One, like some of the silly people responding to the first comment. But it gives us a baseline!

Google needs the money

[Tough Love]

Google needs the money, otherwise Larry might be forced to switch one of the campus sushi bars over to fried chicken.

Re:Google needs the money

[russotto]

Google needs the money, otherwise Larry might be forced to switch one of the campus sushi bars over to fried chicken.

Dammit, now you're tempting me to disloyalty; a fried chicken themed cafe sounds great.

Re:Google needs the money

[datavirtue]

Dude, that is some funny shit. Good visual. I'm I the only one ignoring my mod points?

Software Patents

[DaMattster]

I have to sit back and laugh very hard because software patents are almost mutually assured destruction. I find it fun to point out the hypocrisy of companies that rail against software patents while applying for them at the same time. Google does this ... we all know. Software patents, toughened copyright laws, and other related legal maneuvering has really just created a new legal industry of sue for profit. I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing. Instead, it is being applied in a service industry. Patents were not meant to protect services but manufacturing ideas. No wonder our economy is in the toilet. We squabble over patented services while decimating manufacturing. Hell, we are even outsourcing our services now. What will be left?

Re:Software Patents

[jc42]

I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.

Nah; assorted historians have pointed out that the primary function of patent law has always been to block manufacturing and development. Really, the only thing you can do with a patent is deny others the legal right to build anything based on whatever your patent covers. In theory, you can also collect royalties from licenses, but this is historically insignificant compared to the use of patents to block whatever competitors are trying to manufacture.

Historians have also pointed out that most patent holders have only rarely profited from owning a patent before the patent runs out. Typically they lose money paying for legal actions to block others' use of the patent. After it expires, however, they tend to profit because they're the experts on it, and can thus produce products based on it sooner than their competitors can.

The idea that patents are for providing income to the inventors is just a bit of legal propaganda to keep people confused enough to prevent improving the patent laws. In the real world, it hardly ever works for the patent holder's benefit. (But lawyers often make lots of money in legal patent battles. ;-)

Re:Software Patents

[Mr0bvious]

I know it's not exactly the same and it might not be Google's motive, but I don't like it and I complain when someone is punching me in the face, but when that happens I find it justified to punch them in the face too. In the current climate with all the frivolous patent lawsuits going around, it would be foolish for Google to not amass/acquire a patent portfolio of their own, it's a crazy game and the industry has set the rules - you either play by the rules or you don't play at all unfortunately.

But I do agree with the rest of your post - it's getting just a tad silly now.

Re:Software Patents

[kiddygrinder]

google would be retarded to not apply for patents, it's like saying war is bad in a warzone and then refusing to hold a gun. just because it's bad doesn't mean you don't have to play the game until someone changes the rules. that said google have been very good at not being litigious about the patents they do own.

Re:Software Patents

[Art3x]

I find it fun to point out the hypocrisy of companies that rail against software patents while applying for them at the same time. Google does this ...

As defense

Patents were not meant to protect services but manufacturing ideas.

Interesting.

we are even outsourcing our services now. What will be left?

Well, I think the design of things can be kept. Once you outsource that, you've outsourced it all. Design is the highest job, I think. You can outsource and computerize repetitive tasks, but --- as Apple, for example, has shown --- the design makes all the difference.

Re:Software Patents

[datavirtue]

I think they are genuinely confused into thinking their patents are worth a damn just because the agency grants them. They, the patent office, moved to a wholesale method some time ago.

Re:Software Patents

[datavirtue]

I think the government realized the irrelevance of patents some time ago and are only going to honor the ones that make sense, hence they are just scraping fees from these software companies. It may not be as bad as everyone makes it out to be. The litigation has not been going very well for software patent holders and I think we will see more and more companies going to court instead of settling. Maybe Barns & Noble woke everyone up when they refused to bow to Microsoft?

Re:Software Patents

[a_hanso]

Could you cite a few historians? I too was under the same impression as the grandparent poster.

Re:Software Patents

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

His sig is particularly ironic in this case.

Re:Software Patents

[bmarkovic]

I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.

The original intent of parents, i.e. not the one patent trolls and their lawyers advertise, was to protect knowledge from being lost/forgotten due to industrial secrecy. The intent was to convert private knowledge into public good in exchange for a limited-time legal protection. The idea was never really to ensure monopoly and especially not income of the inventor, but to prevent inventor from keeping his inventions secret by allowing him to be legally protected for a limited time in exchange for publicly disclosing his inventions.

Which is why software patents are retarded and esp. Apple-style trivial UI patents because the society as a whole doesn't benefit from obvious UI gimmicks being presented in a patent format since, even if they weren't non-trivial and derivative, they would be in plain sight and not a part of otherwise hidden internal functioning. So even if the reasoning behind math and business processes not being patentable are not analogous enough there is additional argument against sw patents.

So the entire system that enforces patents of the latter kind is either dishonest or ignorant about the purpose of patent system. I don't know which of the two is worse as a trait for a judge. At least Common law judges can hide behind precedents (but hide only, they are not as bound by precedents as they are by the intent and purpose of a legal institute), but in civil law jurisdictions it would be unforgivable. Which is methinks why Apple sued Samsung on industrial design rather than patents in Germany.

Re:Software Patents

[bmarkovic]

How then do you explain the track record of one judge Lucy Koh in the Apple vs. everybody saga?

Re:Software Patents

[Hognoxious]

It was a typo. He meant "asshatted hysterics".

Re:Software Patents

[jc42]

There's a recent bio of James Watt that has got lots of references. Watt seems like the prototype of a good engineer who tried to use his patents to quash the competition. But he mostly managed to delay the "steam revolution" for a few decades with his lawsuits against other developers. Then, after his main patents ran out, he got down to running a manufacturing business, and became fairly wealthy as a result. I've read a number of other variants on this story; that book is just the latest addition to the list.

(Actually, I think I first ran across a good description of this case history here on /. a few years back. ;-)

Re:Software Patents

[Hadlock]

You misspelt "I probably read it on Reddit once"

I know of a perfect place for those 97MM pages

[twoears]

Lanai. Aloha, Larry!

Re:if Google wins the $4 mil

[crankyspice]

then they'll sue for the legal fees needed to recover the $4 mil, then for the fees for that latter action, etc.

As Zeno of Elea would've pointed out, there is no end to money that Oracle will have to pay Google.

Actually, this is an application (usually made to a clerk) to tax costs, it doesn't include legal fees (which are usually discretionary, if available to the prevailing party at all, and usually only awarded in "exceptional" cases).

Holy Deforestation Batman!

[LSDelirious]

97 million documents for a law suit over 9 lines of code? Seems legit

They should have just told them...

[thegarbz]

...To Google it.

yeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh.

If google lose, ...

[fatp]

oracle demands $2K from google. If oracle loss again, google demands $43...

Next time you meet Larry, sing him a song

[Hognoxious]

# Row, row, row, your boat,
  A rowboat's all you've got.
  Legal fees, legal fees, legal fees, legal fees.
  Can't afford a yacht. /#

Re:Next time you meet Larry, sing him a song

[slug.slug]

Larry Ellison just bought an island, I don't think he cares about measly single digit $M. Now, about saving face, that's another story.

So, what happened?

[gottabeme]

Well? :)