Slashdot Mirror
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.
This is another shining example of why software patents need to be abolished.
I'm now anxiously awaiting expert legal opinions by people who didn't even read the article, much less the patent.
I couldn't find the patent numbers being spoken of here, at least in the first hundred pages of Googles 350+ page brief, and the article itself is pretty useless when it comes to details.
But to answer your question in general, software patents break the entire purpose and intent of the patent system as a whole. That's what makes nearly all of them worthless and impossible.
Patents are intended to describe an implementation of something, previously an implementation of a machine or process.
If one chooses not to design their own machine, they can look for a patent describing a machine that does what they want and license it. At that point you are allowed to build the machine as described in detail in the patent and typically sell it.
That's the entire purpose of licensing a patent in the first place, to save you the time of designing something to perform that function when that work has already been done by someone else.
Software patents however have no such requirement, and thus almost never actually describe any form of working machine or process or anything.
If I want a machine to package my widgets automatically, I could find a patent on a machine to package my particular widget, license it, and use the description of that machine to build a widget packager. If the cost of the patent license is cheaper than doing my own R&D, it's still a win.
But if I want a program to customize my widgets, despite being patents that describe "a process to customize a widget", there is generally no description of any form of software that would do that.
So no matter how much cheaper it would be to license said patent than do my own R&D and programming, actually licensing the patent does not benefit me in any way shape or form since it does not provide any form of software or a design of software that would accomplish that.
Instead the trolls get a patent on the concept and idea of customizing widgets, and then use that to sue me when I do my own R&D and programming work to write a widget customizing program all on my own without their assistance.
That aids no one but the patent trolls, and that aid comes to them for exactly zero effort or work that benefits literally no one.
That is why software patents are wrong and should not exist.
Reissue serial numbers: USRE43500; USRE43528; and USRE43529. Searchable on google.
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.