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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.
My expert and legal opinion is that vanilla is better than chocolate except if you like strawberries, Mac is better than Windows except for games but Linux is better but only for servers, vi is better then emacs except Notepad is easier to use, Canada is better than the USA but still France and Japan are much cooler, Playstation is better than Xbox but Nintendo is more fun, blue is better than red yet ultraviolet is stronger.
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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.