Does this mean that companies will start to patent their APIs? I wonder if this means we should expect virtually the same case s/copyright/patents/g a few years in the future.
Patenting of APIs/protocols/file formats has been going on for a while. The bar for patenting an API will be much higher[1] because it has to be a novel concept.
[1] In theory. In reality, the USPTO will issue anything.
Sure but if it had been a company (or individual) other than Google with less than millions of dollars with which to defend itself how would it have turned out? They'd be out of business leaving lawyers to feed upon the carcass.
How much it does it cost the US tech industry to get all the garbage rubber stamped by USPTO struck down? How much good innovation from small business and individuals has been killed off by small trolls and big company bullies?
whether patents survive litigation or not is irrelevant unless both parties have equivalent resources to spend on litigation. large companies can use their patents to bully small companies into paying licensing fees without having any fear of needing to defend their patents.
which seems to be a problem with the patent invalidation process - it shouldn't cost anyone money to invalidate a patent. If a patent holder's patent is found to be invalidated, the costs for the entire process should be be beared by the patent holder!
That would only work if patent holders were required to post a bond or something at time of filing for the costs of invalidating their own patents. Otherwise, costs will be incurred by the victim in the process of invalidating the bogus patent that will not be recovered until the invalidation is finished. If they run out of money in the mean time, they die, and the patent stands.
It would be very bad to require such a bond to be placed for new patents, as that would be the final blow that kills the idea that patents protect the "little guy."
The judge ordered Oracle to limit themselves to their ten best patents for the case and Oracle chose ten.
Google then went to the Patent and Trademark Office to try to get those ten struck down.
Two out of ten survived review. Eight were declared to have been mistakenly granted. (One of those is still under appeal.) That rate -- eight out of ten of the very best selection of software patents obviously bogus -- is actually low; many more than eight out of ten are bogus on average, even when only considering the best ones. But that was all Google could get from the PTO.
Note that your startup can't just go to the PTO like that when attacked with bogus patents -- it takes years and millions of dollars.
Then the trial started with two remaining patents. But they were not the two that survived review. One survived review and was in the trial. One is rejected on review but can still be appealed and also was in the trial. And one was rejected on review and then re-accepted on review appeal, but had still been rejected when Oracle requested an acceleration of the trial date so they had to abandon the claims to get their earlier trial date. The other seven remain rejected.
I thought part of the case was already a patent lawsuit. Our are you referring to the possibility that Oracle might get patents specifically on the Java APIs and sue with those?
