Google responds to Oracle's patent lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Google responds to Oracle's patent lawsuit

engadget.com

24 pointsmisterbwong17 comments

This is a summary posted by Engadget. I thought it'd be more friendly than the full doc.

Here's the link to the full document if anyone's interested: http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/oracle-google-a...

And it's a response to this full document:

http://regmedia.co.uk/2010/08/13/oracle_complaint_against_go...

But the full document is unintentionally hilarious.

The various invocations of

Google is without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations of paragraph _, and therefore denies them.

amused me greatly when I looked at what was denied. Similarly there was a lot of Google denies any remaining allegations of paragraph _. when every claim of that paragraph had been admitted.

Not a lawyer, but knowingly infringing on a patent opens one to treble damages: http://www.patent-infringement.org/recover.html

So maybe it’s legal speak for “Regardless of what the patents say, we weren’t aware of them.”

You clearly did not compare the documents. Google denied statements such as that Oracle is a software company, is headquartered where it is headquartered, and denied that Oracle purchased Sun and owns the copyrights to Java.

Worry about triple damages was not the reason.

You’re right. My mistake.

Here is a diagram showing who is suing who in the mobile space: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...

Much clearer redesign of the diagram: http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209

If I understood correctly, Google is positioning itself not only to defend Android for themselves, but to further open the Java platform and support Apache Harmony in the process. This sound like great news.

Not a lawyer, but I'd summarize: In Google's view, their use of the parts of the Harmony code as is allowed as the Harmony code is a clean room implementation and Android doesn't use that code to run Java, so there was no need to get licenses from Sun/Oracle. Regarding patents, they simply claim they don't infringe, I don't see that they claim why -- maybe because they don't actually use any code, but the device makers who install them on their hardware?

Clean room design would be a defense against the copyright charge. They broke clean room design by hiring engineers from sun, jvm engineers etc. Even google's ceo came from sun and he lead java at sun.

The patents are integral to the JVM.

Google should have bought Palm and Sun for the patents.

.NET can step on the JVM patents: http://www.itworld.com/040409microsoftlegal

They got lucky with yahoo: http://news.cnet.com/Google,-Yahoo-bury-the-legal-hatchet/21... They could have been pushed out of the space. They are use to getting sweet deals in stomping on others patents, copyrights, etc.

> They broke clean room design by hiring engineers from sun, jvm engineers etc.

AFAIK not unless Oracle proves that exactly these engineers were involved. And a lot more must be first proved to establish even "involved in what."

> The patents are integral to the JVM.

Google doesn't use JVM in Android.

Is it whatsoever possible for Google to get a group of companies together and counter-sue Oracle and Microsoft en masse? I mean Motorola isn't without a strong patent portfolio, and I doubt they'd be the only ones on board?

Forgive me if its a naive thought, but it seems like we might just be seeing the beginning of Google patent issues (and I obviously treat the MS/Motorola thing as a Google patent issue).

Is the risk of pissing off MS/Oracle too great (not for Google, but for potential allies?)

Why haven't they gone nuclear yet?! I wanna see that bad.

Google already licensed the patents from Microsoft that Microsoft is now suing Motorola over.

So, the standard opening moves to the multi-year patent litigation dance.

On a related note, I haven't heard much on here / proggit about MS sueing motorola over android patents, any news there?

it's gonna be so much fun, can't wait.

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