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Chrome's Sandbox Feature Infringes On Three Patents So Google Must Now Pay $20 Million (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: After five years of litigation at various levels of the U.S. legal system, today, following the conclusion of a jury trial, Google was ordered to pay $20 million to two developers after a jury ruled that Google had infringed on three patents when it designed Chrome's sandboxing feature. Litigation had been going on since 2012, with Google winning the original verdict, but then losing the appeal. After the Supreme Court refused to listen to Google's petition, they sent the case back for a retrial in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, the home of all patent trolls. As expected, Google lost the case and must now pay $20 million in damages, in the form of rolling royalties, which means the company stands to pay more money as Chrome becomes more popular in the future.
While I generally disagree with software patents in general, using these as an example may be a poor choice. Looking at the 3 patents in question this seems more an example of how overworked the patent system as a whole is. There are numerous cases of prior art of these patents, which all seem variations on a single patent just as reissues. This is an example of patents that never should have been granted in the first place based on the prior art in place. Only someone totally out of touch would think sandboxing was a novel concept in 2009 when the original patent was issued.
I've read a lot of patents, and written a lot of software (I've spent far more time programming though).
I've read some *extremely* specific "software patents"*, and some very general ones. The company I work for has a patent so specific that it would be hard to infringe it. If you tried, you'dv probably accidentally do something slightly differently, so your implementation wouldn't be covered by our patent.
There are about 40 MILLION commercial airplane flights each year. Of those 40 million, about 2 have fatal crashes. So 39,999,998 safe flights, 2 crashes. We all know which flights end up all over the news.
Patents are similar. Bad ones end up on the news, often being the subject of extensive litigation. If someone didn't know anything about commercial aviation, they'd never been on a plane or at at airport, just watching the news they might reasonably be very afraid of flying. Every flight they've ever heard about crashed. If you know something about aviation, you know that's not even a million-to-one chance, it's a twenty-million-to-one chance. If you've never had reason to read patents, and never been in any kind of court trial, you might reasonably think most of them are like the ones you hear about in the news.
There ARE some patents that are overly broad, which sucks. There are some plane flights that crash, which also sucks.
Actually even the patents you hear about in the news are frequently *not* actually like what you hear in the news, especially on Slashdot - patent law is a big clickbait item on Slashdot. Most of us know that half the tech-related headlines and summaries we see on Slashdot are basically BS. The same is true of patents.
Some company will apply for a patent related to new type of fire extinguisher for cars that uses a new compound they've developed, which requires a new kind of valve they've invented to handle it. They've *applied for* a patent to cover "toroidal double monkey valve inverted for use in automotive fire extinguishers using dry dimethyl carbonate extinguishing agent". The Slashdot headline will most assuredly be "Company Patents Fire Extinguishers". The summary will mention fire extinguishers in cars, but won't mention the newly invented valve which is the thing they are actually trying to patent. Slashdot commenters go wild posting about "prior art - Nascar". You can't really blame them, the summary didn't even mention the patent is for a special valve the company invented, to use with a brand new type of extingushing agent. Commenters react to the headline, not having any way to know it's BS unless they take time to research it.
* There's no such thing as a "software patent", but that's a topic for another day.