Patents are meant to protect developers, inventors, and companies from lawsuits and from competitors stealing designs. They are also sometimes used for ill means, such as increasing revenue or to take down the competition a couple of notches. With advances in software development came lawsuits between developers for patents on processes of code, some are legitimate but many are so generalist that anyone with skill attempting to develop in the same language cannot avoid violating the patent. If the product resulting from this is highly successful then it is likely that the company with the patent, of which they sometimes own thousands of patents, will sue over the rights for awards sometimes in the millions of dollars. Many of these lawsuits are held in Eastern Texas because of the favorable outcome likely to the patent holder. On top of the cost to the successful developer there is also the public reputation loss to take into account. Would you buy a product if you believed that that product was stolen intellectual property? Thus in one blow large companies take aim as much for the other companies reputation with bad press as it does for money. Sometimes the company holding the patent did not even develop the product that he patent is covering.
One such battle is currently being fought. Oracle is suing Google for patent violations that they acquired by purchasing Sun. Prior to this recent purchase Oracle had very little to do with Java, the programming language that the patent violation are for. While this is not what is commonly known as patent trolling, where a small company sues a large company primarily for revenue using a frivolous patent, it is what I believe to be patent pirating.
Open source is a coding standard that allows all users to look at source code and learn from it, copy and modify it, and distribute it freely with certain restrictions. This lawsuit should be thrown out of court partly because a lot of open source products are developed by volunteers and other people that are willing to put the time and the effort in to help others. Another reason this should be thrown out is the intellectual property being disputed over was not developed by them. The original developers that wrote these patents no long work for Sun / Oracle and now work for Google. Also, take into account the original developer of this open source code being fought over said that the patent was "bullshit." To understand we need to give some history in relation to open source. The concept of open source, free sharing of technological information, was around before computers. (Open Source, 2010) In the beginning years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists legally owned the rights to a 2 cycle gasoline engine patent. With control of this information they were able to force the car industry manufactures to adhere to patent terms, or face possible lawsuits. Many people challenge this patent, but none were as successful as Henry Ford. During this lawsuit, the original patent became worthless and a new group formed (eventually to be known as the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association). The label “open source” was adopted by some people in the free software movement at a meeting held in Palo Alto, California. Christine Peterson was among many people that attended and she was the one that suggested using the term “open source.” It was debated over many times, but in the end the “open source” name stuck. Starting in the early 2000s, a number of companies began to publish a portion of their source code to ensure they were considered open source. In doing so, the companies also kept key parts closed. This eventually built up to the now mainly used terms of free open source software and commercial open source software (Open Source, 2010).
GNU GPL was introduced even before the term open source became main stream. The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989 for use with programs released as part of the GNU project. The GNU GPL is the most widely used open source license to date. It is also one of the tools being used by Google in this lawsuit to defend its self.
Java reached its popularity partially due to the fact that it is a very friendly community to developers. Since 2008 it has been covered by the GPL (General Public License). The GPL is supposed to give developers the freedom to look at, copy, modify, and re-distribute the source code and be protected from law suits just like this one. When Java was initially released it was not open source. Sun used JDK (Java developer kits) to release their product to the developer. Who then had to write the code and license their code with Sun. This became known as the “Java trap” as the license was rather expensive and restrictive and did not allow the modification except to certain sections of the source code. Even before there was a GPL on java other groups had formed to create java technology for open source, a rift had formed in the code source that would never be fully repaired.
In the last few years the mobile phone industry has been using java for various purposes. The most notable of these is the Android OS. The speed and number of Android spin offs is evidence in itself how popular the Java language has become. Slight variants of the source code helps companies release their products faster with fewer problems. The problem with this comes in when you try to write something that will be run on a slightly modified version when you aren’t aware of the changes that were made.
The software industry is built on intellectual property that must be protected not only from people stealing it, but also from hindering progress. If Oracle wins this case it could highly disrupt the progress that java has made. There are many programmers and companies that may either knowingly or unknowingly be in violation in the same way that Google might be. These companies may now decide to cease development on the platform in the future. The main reason due to the fact that they can no longer trust not being sued for common intellectual property. The patent is “bullshit” morally vs. legally. Sun Microsystems owned Java. Gosling and several other engineers developed the patents that were in question. Sun has never sued over what it knew to exist. It was well known that Google was using Sun Microsystems code, but they were not willing to sue over it. Java is the flagship of open source cross platform development. When Oracle acquired Sun (January 2010), they acquired Gosling, whom is the original creator Java. Gosling quit shortly after Oracle had taking over Sun. A key issue in the case is that the Oracle is suing based on the java language in the android mobile operating system that allegedly infringes on seven of Oracle’s Java patents.
Another issue at hand is the legal system as we know it doesn’t understand technology. This trial in particular Oracle has requested a jury trial. A jury should consist of peers by definition. So to me that means that we should bring special effort to jury selection to make sure that each and every juror is capable of understanding the fundamentals of what is being discussed. In this case that would require having computer scientists filling the jury box. Also the judge, Hon. William Alsup, may or may not be able to understand the lines of code himself. At the least this case requires strong language skills and a very good head for math.
Does this Oracle Patent Suit have value? In order for a patent to be defendable, it must be novel, and its invention must be non-obvious; that is the invention must not be obvious to someone in that field. Novel in this situation is relating to its adjective meaning which means of a new kind; different from anything seen or known before. Just because a patent is defendable does not necessarily mean it is defendable in a court of law (The Oracle vs. Google Patent Lawsuit Demystified, 2010).
What is considered a patent? There is an innumerable amount of opinions in this area that lead the majority to not believe that these software patents are defendable. James Gosling, while working at Sun, on an August 15 blog stated that, “an unofficial competition to see who could get the goofiest patent through the system.” (The Oracle vs. Google Patent Lawsuit Demystified, 2010). The main reason why there was a “competition” was because Sun lost a lawsuit to IBM on a “RISC patent that asserted that ‘if you make something simpler, it’ll go faster…’” (Gosling, 2010).
The first patent in question is the United States Patent 6,910,205, June 21, 2005 (Bak, Lars (Palo Alto, & Robert (Menlo Park, 2005). This patent’s official name is the Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine instructions, but it is commonly known “Speeding up Something Slow Makes it faster patent.” This patent seems to be the IT (information technology) equivalent of someone patenting the idea that you add more electricity to make a light bulb brighter. So let’s make a conclusion. I believe upon reading parts of the patent that it is hardly perceived as novel and non-obvious ideas. The second patent in question is the United States Patent RE38, 104, April 2003 (Gosling & James (Redwood City, 2003). The official name of this patent is the Method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated cost, but this patent is more commonly known as the “direct is more direct than indirect” patent. This patent strongly resembles IBM RISC patent. In relation to this case, the patent is stating that if you reference something directly, you can get to it faster than if you reference it indirectly. Did this really all come to a head in the spring of 2003? I believe strongly that this is hardly a novel idea. Charles Nutter stated it best, “the techniques seem obvious to me, but perhaps they’re obvious because this patent helped make them standard. I am not qualified to judge. What I can say is that I can’t imagine a virtual machine in existence that doesn’t violate the spirit—if not the letter—of this patent.” (The Oracle vs. Google Patent Lawsuit Demystified, 2010). The third patent in question is the United States Patent 7,426,720, September 2008 (Fresko & Nedim (San Francisco, 2008). The patent is officially known as the system and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process, but is more commonly known as “memory access is faster than disc access” patent. In layman’s terms, this patent states that it is easier and more efficient to clone a class that is in memory, than to create an instance of that same class by reading its representation on a disc, and then loading it into memory (The Oracle vs. Google Patent Lawsuit Demystified, 2010). So what’s the verdict? In my opinion anyone who has ever started and booted up a computer knows that this is pretty obvious.
The fourth patent in question is the United States Patent 5,966,702 October 12, 1999 (Fresko; Nedim, Tuck; Richard (San Francisco, CA). This patent is titled Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files and is very accurately named. It covers the basics of compression and decompression of files. This is not a novel concept and has been around at least since 1991 since Winzip started. Understandably you would not want a third party program to zip and unzip your code for your program. Of course this code had to be written. I do not believe it needed a patent as the idea behind it was already existed.
The fifth patent in question is the United States Patent 6,125,447 September 2000 (Gong; Li Menlo Park, CA). This patent title is Protection domains to provide security in a computer system. Well this sounds good but user authentication is hardly a new concept in 2000. Novel and Unix where doing similar things well before then. The method they describe in this patent is even very similar to the authentication for Unix systems. User authentication is very common not only on the operating system, but also any database you access has some sort of authentication built into it.
The sixth patent in question is the United States Patent 6,061,520 May 2000 (Yellin; Frank (Redwood City, CA), Tuck; Richard D. (San Francisco, CA). This patent is titled Method and system for performing static initialization. This patent is the most technical patent of the group. The problem that this code addresses is bringing a static array to your machine and making it readable. The approach used is different than most of what else has been used but the idea itself is an age old problem when it comes to writing programs for computers. The very technical aspect of this patent in itself complicates the case and is the reason a normal jury pool would likely not be able to understand the material presented.
In conclusion the intellectual property being sued over is already released to the public. The market is saturated with Android phones and Oracle wants a piece of the pie that they had no hand in making. They are obtaining this piece through legal but unethical means. Patents are a dangerous tool being used by corporations to do public and financial damage to each other. Intellectual property of this nature should not be able to be bought and used as leverage against your competition.