#patentfun is a weekly round up of the articles that pertain to the lawsuits surrounding the Android OS.
So, lots of news this week with the whole Oracle thing… and I’ll touch on a few, but the news is so thick it’s hard to tell what is and isn’t really going on with it… these days. Hopefully Robert, now that he’s done school, can weigh in and give you his perspective.
Google vs. Oracle
First we fond out that Google was guilty of infringement, but yet it wasn’t decided whether they were ‘fair use’ or not. And that has some crazy legal ramifications. This will go on for a while with appeals and what not.
I’ve found AndroidCentral (you know, the guys who brough SHOPANDROID to Canada recently.. remember the sale runs until the end of today!) has a really good “layman’s” read through if you’re up for it.
As the next phase of this suit goes on, there’s going to be a lot of legal banter between Oracle and Google, and what they want to tell the judge on how to proceed. Google’s hoping to expedite some of the process by asking for a Summary Judgement (wanting Oracle to prove that there’s financial damage); whereas Oracle wants a ‘more defined’ trial looking only particularly at the ‘fair use’ portion of the infringing.
The whole thing is a little bit nuts right now, with tons of lawyers (and bloggers) trying to make sense of the whole ‘what now’ scenario. Not to plug out a G+ friend’s opinion, but I think he got it right.
Apple & Samsung
…slim down the claims they’re making, but they still are fighting like little children. This could be good, as it’ll help the juries focus on what’s really at hand, (and hopefully see how childish this whole thing is) rather than making largesse claims against each other that are so nebulous you want to hand a judgement over to someone, just to make them go away.
But, being very specific allows each to become VERY passionate and fanatical about those very specific claims, and that kind of obsessiveness could make these cases linger on much longer than necessary.
Remember last week (all 12 of you who read this weekly column) when Posner didn’t like how Apple was just frivolously filing claims… well he threw out over 3,000 pages recently filed by Apple. Now, as much as he probably wanted to throw them out because he’s said he’s getting tired of their antics, it’s also because of a bit of a rule by the ITC over page length of attachments shouldn’t be more than the filing itself… so anything over that length gets thrown out. Hah… I find that kinda funny.
Then, also hear that it looks like that although they dropped a bunch of claims, Apple still has the right to bring them back up when they need to, like some hurt ex-girlfriend or something. Which holds some water for that analogy as Apple is now blaming Samsung for ‘destroying evidence’.
Like school children I say… like school children.
Okay, so that’s some of the ‘highlights’ (and I’m using the term very loosely lately) that I saw this past week. I’m finding that there’s much more, but I’m trying to limit my scope of these articles to refer to Android specifically, and not just general Android manufacturers.
Here’s hoping Roberts comes through with his analysis to give you a better picture of what’s going on here.
Until then… how did you see things?