
Verdict for Google in Oracle's patent infringement case - grellas
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120523125023818
======
grellas
A few thoughts on this:

Google had pushed for a fall trial date at the earliest but Oracle argued
vigorously (and successfully) for an immediate date on grounds that the case
was ready with Google only playing for time. To induce the judge to give it an
early trial date, Oracle offered to dismiss with prejudice all patents that
had been rejected in a final office action by the USPTO subject to
reinstatement in the event the PTO reversed itself prior to the start of
trial. Trial started on April 16 and, lo and behold, the PTO did reverse
itself concerning one significant patent (the '702 patent) such that Oracle
would normally have been able to pursue its claims for infringement based on
that patent. However, it did so a few days _after_ the trial had started. As a
result, that claim wound up being finally dismissed for purposes of this
lawsuit. Oracle tried to renege and pushed the judge to reinstate the claim
but the judge said no (decision here:
([http://www.scribd.com/doc/91307218/Oracle-denied-using-
reviv...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/91307218/Oracle-denied-using-revived-
patent-vs-Google\)\[pdf\])).

Thus, Oracle screwed itself as a result of having charged full speed with
tomahawk swinging wildly in the air. In pushing aggressively for tactical
advantage, it essentially threw away the one patent claim that had any
potential for viability (the two patent claims on which it lost at trial were
in fact relatively weak, with one of the two patents about to go down before
the USPTO and set in any event to expire in December, among other things).

Oracle now finds itself in a deep hole. It won a few crumbs in the copyright
phase and got skunked on the patent phase. More copyright drama to follow as
the judge rules on API copyrightability. Oracle _might_ win on that issue, as
it is a tricky one under Ninth Circuit law (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3980642>), but it then faces a retrial in
which the judge would give much more refined instructions on what it means to
infringe the SSO of the Java APIs than he gave in the first trial - between
that and the (I think, formidable) fair use defense that Google has, it is
strictly an uphill fight for Oracle from here on out. (By the way, Google has
done a _masterful_ job of arguing the issue of why APIs should not be
copyrightable and, for those inclined to read through a superb legal brief on
the issues, here it is: <http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1137.pdf>).

Oracle may yet rally if a lot of things go its way. I wouldn't bet on it
though. Much more likely, in my view, is that the case becomes a testament to
what happens when a party makes a high-stakes opportunistic legal grab that
goes badly awry. What Larry Ellison set out to justify as Oracle's vindication
has instead become Oracle's folly.

~~~
statictype
Sorry for the stupid question that ignores the rest of your excellent summary:

"dismiss with prejudice"

What does 'with prejudice' imply here? I've seen this used many times in
various government/legal contexts ('cancelled without prejudice') etc...

What does the 'with/without prejudice' part mean?

~~~
kronusaturn
It means that the judgment is final and the case cannot be reopened.

See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_%28law%29>

------
parfe
Kudos to the jury. They put a lot of effort into understanding the issue at
hand. Based on courtroom reporting, the jury paid attention and they asked
clarifying questions while deliberating to make sure they understood. Software
patents are a mess. Oracle's arguments were terrible from a CS standpoint (and
their expert should be embarrassed).

I believe the only issue still on the table is API copyrightability which
Judge Aslup will rule on as a matter of law. The jury found for Oracle in that
instance because the jury instructions essentially mandated it. I expect Aslup
will rule for Google on that claim as well.

Oracle's current claim for money is literally for 9 lines of code called
rangeCheck (which anyone in a high school intro to java class could write),
and 8 test files copied by a subcontractor and never distributed to end users.

A certain Oracle paid blogger will still manage to post how Oracle basically
got everything it wanted.

~~~
pratikjhaveri
Who's the paid blogger?

~~~
mintplant
Most likely a reference to Florian Mueller, of <http://www.fosspatents.com/>

Detail: [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/04/19/1357207/florian-
muell...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/04/19/1357207/florian-mueller-outs-
himself-as-oracle-employee)

~~~
cooldeal
Is there any evidence that PJ is not a paid blogger herself? At least Florian
was honest to declare on his blog that he was paid by Oracle to do some work
and his blog might be tainted by that.

~~~
joe_the_user
Your ad hominem is rather disgusting. Put up evidence or shut up.

I called Florian as a corporate shill here more than a year ago based on
publicly available information. I believe him "outing himself" is more recent.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128882>

Edit: Also pj called it.
<http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103>

~~~
taligent
PJ called it alright. No offense but Groklaw's behaviour against Florian has
been nothing short of disgraceful and extremely immature.

Who cares if Florian is being paid by Microsoft et al ? It happens all the
time amongst bloggers and doesn't mean jack to me. EVERYONE is biassed in some
way. Whether through money, previous experiences or external pressures. As a
reader you should always consult multiple sources.

It's been really disappointing watching the great work that Groklaw do be
sullied by all these personal attacks.

~~~
rapind
Really? Who cares who's paying your news source? Isn't possible bias one of
the most important issues when it comes to trusting a source?

There are degrees of bias and as a reader why would you want to waste your
time reading from a source known to have a massive conflict of interest?

I definitely appreciate knowing about a source's bias.

~~~
flomo
It's certainly fine to know about it, IMO, but all of the internet taunting
seems immature and unnecessary.

~~~
fpgeek
Part of the taunting now is in response to his past behavior.

Florian repeatedly refused to talk about his funding and insisted it was
irrelevant (he has a history at lwn.net among other places). Now that we know
the full context, people on the other side of that argument naturally want to
underline it.

------
Natsu
What I want to know now is where we go on the copyright. The judge is taking
an incredibly long time working on that. The speculation I've read says that
this may be good for Google, but who knows?

I saw a comment from Grellas on a prior story that said that the judge has
some crazy precedents to deal with in his circuit and they can't freely adopt
the Borland case's logic without dealing with them. I'd like to know how the
request for briefs on Sony v. Connectix figures into that. Is that case from
the same circuit? If so, that would really make me believe that he's working
on a pro-Google ruling. After all, it shouldn't be that hard to come up with a
finding of infringement. You only have a lot of justification to do if you
want to find non-infringement.

Finally, I wonder what, if any, the impact of the juror telling us that is was
9-3 in favor of Google will be. Does that help support a finding of fair use
or not?

That said, I'm glad to hear that Google has been cleared of infringing upon
these absurd patents. I just hope they still get invalidated too, so that no
one else ever has to worry about them.

------
gfodor
Almost as memorable as the verdict will be the outright shame and absurdity
that was the "rangeCheck defense." It made a mockery of the system and was
insulting to the judge and jury. "Check upper bound, check lower bound, throw
exception. You can't explain that!"

~~~
raldi
Could you elaborate on that? I'm familiar with the rangeCheck() issue, but I'm
not sure what you're trying to say about it.

~~~
gfodor
rangeCheck's implementation is a baby step above "Hello World". Oracle's
lawyer stood up in front of a judge and jury and tried to claim that that
function and Joshua Bloch's admission that he copied it was evidence of
Google's guilt. Basically, he tried to take advantage of their lack of domain
knowledge to fool them into thinking this was a real Thing Worth Deliberating.
Turns out his ploy failed since the judge knew wtf he was talking about and
actually codes.

A (flawed) analogy would be if it were a case around the copyright
infringement of a book whereby the author, at a new company, copied the phrase
"Table of Contents" from a previous novel and pasted it into his new book's
table of contents at the head of the page. Anyone with half a brain that
understands the domain of writing realizes this is elementary and outside of
the scope of what constitutes real, novel IP. Arguing such a point reveals you
want to exploit the ignorance of your audience to not know that "Table of
Contents" is a phrase used in the industry and obvious to come up with on your
own to describe that part of the book. Basically, once the jig is up and the
audience knows you're full of it, every claim you make downstream from there
("I know it would take me months to be able to write rangeCheck") makes you
look even worse.

The reason this is memorable to me is it makes it as transparent as one could
hope as to who in the room was arguing based upon reality, and who was arguing
to win. For a software company to do this is an embarrassment since we are
supposed to be increasing computer literacy not exploit computer illiteracy to
our own advantage.

~~~
raldi
Ah, I was thrown off because you said "rangeCheck defense" -- it sounds like
you meant "rangeCheck offense".

~~~
gfodor
Ah yes, I was implying a similarity to the "Chewbacca defense" in its
stupidity :)

------
jacquesm
Fantastic news for Google and the rest of the world. And a good thing for the
other Larry as well, at least now he has some confirmation that he really
isn't god.

Next up, the appeal.

~~~
pron
I don't know. I was kinda hoping Google will license Java for Andorid, and
we'll have one Java instead of two.

~~~
wtallis
That's not Google's choice. Sun and Oracle are the ones refusing to allow the
Java trademark to be used by an open-source implementation for a mobile
platform.

~~~
wmf
I think Oracle would allow it if the price was right. The problem is that "one
Java" probably means Java SE, which means you have to use bloat like JAR files
and Swing/AWT, which would make Android less competitive with iOS.

~~~
pmjordan
Would it really help if someone paid $Nbn for the Java label for some snapshot
of Harmony or whatever? Open source software (which is open in spirit, not
just by name) is always a moving target. As soon as you fork it, it's no
longer covered by the license. And when is it a fork, exactly?

~~~
wmf
I don't think anybody's talking about a snapshot. During the Sun/Google
negotiations there was discussion of an ongoing partnership where Google would
be forced to adopt new versions of Java as the JCP released them. Google
didn't want the JCP backseat-driving Android, so they declined.

------
DigitalSea
We all knew Google would win. Next up the imminent appeal (if Oracle want to
get themselves butt hurt a second time). If the jury and judge had ruled that
API's were copyrightable, who knows what that could have done to sites like
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and any other site that relies on a third party
framework, library or piece of code to functionally operate.

Oracle are the rotting enterprise dinosaur that refuses to accept evolution
and adapt or just die. The patent system is a absolute joke.

~~~
idspispopd
Oracle are unlikely to appeal, especially because it was a jury case.

>If the jury and judge had ruled that API's were copyrightable, who knows what
that could have done to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and any other
site that relies on a third party framework, library or piece of code to
functionally operate.

The jury did see that Google infringed copyright by implementing the APIs,
however this doesn't impact others in the way you've stated because using an
API isn't the same as copying someone else's, and even then it was still
narrowly defined.

>Oracle are the rotting enterprise dinosaur that refuses to accept evolution
and adapt or just die.

This isn't all true, while I'm certain their motivation was not in the right
place to begin with, the case they brought did have merits regarding the
fragmentation of java. (As there are similarities to the microsoft case.)

------
gruseom
FTA plus amen: "Patents and software need to get a divorce before somebody
gets hurt. The damage is astounding, and the IP is so puny. There is an
imbalance in the legal universe, and it needs fixing."

------
dayjah
Great news for Google, Android, and an entire ecosystem. Bad news for my ORCL
stock :/

~~~
LockeWatts
Why do you have ORCL stock?

~~~
klenwell
I bought Oracle stock (not much) years ago after watching the final part of
Triumph of the Nerds, where Larry Ellison laid out his vision of a thin-client
future. He was basically right, although where he saw Oracle serving as the
backend infrastructure for this glorious new future, Google and other
internet-oriented startups have stepped in.

What I really wanted to buy, I see now, was Google stock. But it didn't exist
at that point and when Google's IPO came along a few years later I didn't have
enough discretionary income to bother.

~~~
nkassis
Yeah Larry came out pretty good in that interview. But it was a different time
for sure. (Mid 90s right?) I think in the end greed surpass his ability to
implement his vision.

------
dannyr
This post made it to #1 on HN in less than 10 minutes.

Is this a record?

~~~
mbreese
Don't all posts start at #1 immediately, then trail away until they get
upvotes? Or is that just how a user sees their own submissions?

~~~
jacquesm
You see it as #1 on the 'newest' page, but not on the 'new' page.

------
nthitz
"$6 billion damages" headlines sell more ads is all

~~~
fluidcruft
"Oracle loses $6 billion" should sell pretty well, too. To bad it won't
happen, though--it would be nice to have some blowback temper jackassery and
chest-thumping.

~~~
taligent
"Oracle CEO kills kittens" also. It's equally as accurate and makes just as
much sense.

------
Nate75Sanders
Can someone explain what the practical outcomes are of this verdict? For
programmers and companies?

~~~
revelation
This particular one? Not much. But its good news to hear that a jury isn't to
be fooled by mispresenting facts.

Oracle literally tried to present dexopt as a dynamic optimizer, because it
optimizes for the hardware/software configuration on your smartphone. Thats
coming from the makers of the HotSpot VM.

~~~
waqf
I would rather say that Oracle tried to present "dynamic" as a word which
refers to what dexopt does. Because there was no dispute over what dexopt
does, only over what "dynamic" means.

------
T_S_
> Patents and software need to get a divorce before somebody gets hurt.

Well said.

------
ww520
That's good news for the Android and Java community. One less patent roadblock
looming over the heads.

------
arjn
Oh thank goodness ! Finally its over. I hope Oracle learns some kind of lesson
from this.

------
a3d6g2f7
This seems like (yet another) suit that never should have been filed to begin
with. Everyone lost time, and everyone except the lawyers and the court (court
fees) lost money.

~~~
taligent
You're not serious ? This is EXACTLY the type of suits that should be filed.

There were legitimate issues to be discussed and it made the entire software
industry think about what it means for an API to be copyrighted, defense of
software patents etc. This decision has set a precedent that we may not see
repeated again.

I say it was absolutely worth it.

~~~
dminor
Actually the API copyright question has not been answered yet - the judge has
yet to rule on whether it's copyrightable, and the jury hung on whether it's
fair use.

This case is not over.

------
davidpayne11
And now we can re-tweet at the Florian Mueller dick (the bastard at FOSS
patents) how wrong he was. Check that dick's article:

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/jury-doesnt-find-
google-t...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/05/jury-doesnt-find-google-to-
infringe-two.html)

~~~
pyre
You realize that you're just giving him more publicity, which is what his end-
goal is. No one will pay him to be a shill if he doesn't have an audience.

------
gringomorcego
On a sidenote:

I think most people should be much more questionable about groklaw. I am big
open source and FSF advocate, but I'm not above thinking that groklaw is
controlled/funded by a much larger power.

I hope it's just a conspiracy theory. But I do think that anonymity works both
ways; it can imply that you want to say the truth unencumbered, but it also
can imply astroturfing.

Just because the wind blows this way doesn't mean it always will.

~~~
jasonlotito
> but I'm not above thinking that groklaw is controlled/funded by a much
> larger power.

Proof? Anything? This line has been used since the early days of SCO. I've
never seen anything resembling proof.

Indeed, Groklaw has earned the trust I give them. Do not mistake ignorance for
insightfulness.

~~~
ssmall
I really like the blog and its my go to site for legal software news and I
don't think there is some kind of higher power backing it but I'm still very
careful with everything I read there. I haven't seen any evidence of corporate
backing, but there is no attempt to hide bias. Its definitely far from an
objective news source.

~~~
wtallis
What bias? You may be confusing _bias_ with _opinion_. "Equal time" is not
unbiased reporting, and having a clear opinion is not bias, unless your
opinion turns out to be consistently _wrong_.

~~~
lmm
The editorializing gets tiresome when I just want to find out what happened
during the trial. It feels like reading the Daily Mail; you can get actual
news from there, but you have to be constantly on your guard against osmosing
their opinions.

------
iscrewyou
I am not a girl but...yay!

~~~
jamestaylor1
huh?

