Office by Alex Penny
My name is Bill, I am a recent graduate in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and this is a place for me to post or give my 2 cents on the fascinating world of technology. I am now working for a pretty big technology related company whose name I will leave out just to avoid any possible complications, however far-fetched them happening may be. Music gets included from time to time as well.
“The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. This is a progressive, dynamic industry rife with invention. But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry are absent. Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software inventions are quickly superseded. Software innovation tends to be piecemeal—not entire devices, but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop, etc.) may have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of separate components (bits of software code or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable. The result is huge patent thickets, creating rich opportunities for trying to hamstring competitors by suing for infringement—and also for infringing, and then challenging the validity of the patent when the patentee sues you.”
It’s been bothering me how a case so ripe for parody wasn’t being noticed by them or The Daily Show.
Reposted from http://lat.ms/PizieT on August 24, 2012 at 08:40PM
The judge presiding over the infringement case between Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. spotted two inconsistencies in the jury’s pro-Apple verdict and asked the nine-member jury to return to the deliberation room to reconsider the issues.
Admittedly I am fairly biased against Apple, but some of the patents they’re claiming are just ridiculous. What’s everyone else’s opinion of this case?
I don’t understand how this is any more infringement than any other android device. This better not result in the Galaxy S3 getting blocked or I’m going to be pissed.
A federal judge in San Francisco has handed Oracle another setback in its case against Google. Oracle Corp. had accused Google Inc. of stealing Oracle’s Java programming language to build Google‘s Android software for mobile devices.
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How the jury decided that android infringed on copyright but not patents is beyond me. While I can’t say I disagree with the outcome, this entire trial was incredibly strange. Of course we still have to see what the judge decides about whether API’s are covered by copyright or not but I don’t see there being any chance of Oracle coming away from this happy.
“If Alsup finds that the SSO is copyrightable, the two minor infringement counts will be bundled along with the SSO charge to be handled in any new trial or appeal. If he rules against Oracle on this point, however, Alsup will simply award Oracle statutory damages — a maximum of $150,000 for each of the two counts. That doesn’t leave Oracle out in the cold, though; Alsup’s ruling on SSO copyrightability will no doubt be appealed, and should it be overturned and the case sent down to be tried again, Oracle will have the opportunity to re-open the two minor copyright counts to go after larger damages.”
“Given this, says Ronald Abramson, a ruling on the Java APIs could be relevant to almost any other common way of sending data. ‘These are a pretty typical APIs. They’re a definition of how you talk to something,’ he says. ‘This would be a strong precedent and it would be pretty difficult to distinguish them from other APIs…I would be concerned that [the ruling] would have broad ramifications for other APIs and beyond APIs. If you can copyright the structure, sequence, and organization of data, that changes the landscape.’”
It’s ridiculous this is even up for debate. Copyrights are explicitly meant for creative works, patents are meant for processes. Even if this wasn’t the case, saying you could copyright an API in Java is like saying you can copyright the instruments on a recording.
