Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:19 AM EST

Judge Alsup just put the kibosh on Google's lawyers' Holiday plans [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:23 AM EST

Please summarize in the Title box error->correction or s/error/correction/ to

make it easy for Mark or PJ to scan to see what needs to be corrected and to

make it easy for readers to see what corrections have already been reported.



[ Reply to This | # ]



file there respective->file their respective - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:31 AM EST

Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:24 AM EST

Please stay off topic in these threads. Do consider using HTML Formatted mode to

make your comments pretty and your links clickable. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:26 AM EST

Pick your News here. Please put the title of the News Picks article you are

commenting on in the Title box of your comment. That makes it so much easier for

the reader who scans the headers to see what they are about.



Also please use include a link to the article in your comment, preferably using

HTML Formatted mode to make it clickable. That makes it easy for readers to find

the article after it has scrolled off the News Picks sidebar.



Hint: To avoid the Geeklog bug that sometimes adds an extra space in the text of

a link or worse breaks the link completely, add a space in between the closing

'>' of the tag and the text of the link, as in the following example.



<a href="http://example.com/a?foo"> Link</a>



That space before the text " Link" prevents that bug from triggering. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:28 AM EST

Thank you for helping transcribe the Comes exhibits. Please post them with HTML markup, but posted in Plain Old Text mode to make it easy for PJ to copy and paste them. Find a pdf to transcribe, and if you have a registered login book your intention to prevent duplication of effort, at the Comes Tracking Page [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: cbc on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:41 AM EST

"In making this submission, counsel shall keep in mind that they are

officers of the court and full candor is required."



Whoa! [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: DaveJakeman on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 09:57 AM EST

I find it odd that Google are being instructed to "identify any further

products by Oracle or Sun that practiced any of the 26 asserted claims". I

would have thought that should be entirely up to Oracle and if Oracle miss the

boat, then tough. They are the plaintiff, after all.



---

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over

generations, the truth seems utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving

lunatic. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: jpvlsmv on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:11 AM EST

>> Google will only list products they can prove practiced

>> the asserted claims



This is a strange requirement in the order. It seems to be asking Google to

determine exactly what is and isn't in scope for each patent before trial.



I mean, Oracle can't even list (the accused Android) products they can prove

practice the claims, because that hasn't been decided by the jury yet.



With all the wrangling about whether the patent encompasses just a single

virtual machine instruction, or can cover multiple virtual machine instructions

(for example), how can Google say that they can prove anything?



--Joe [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: IANALitj on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:18 AM EST

In addition to the striking reminders that "full candor is required,"

Judge Alsup made a substantial addition to what Google is quoted as requesting.

(I am relying on the succinct quotations provided; I have not gone back to the

sources, to see whether there is some definition by which "Oracle"

includes "Sun.")



Google requested that "Oracle identify each Oracle product or

Oracle-licensed product that allegedly practices the claim."



Judge Alsup ordered that "Counsel for Oracle shall identify, for each of

the 26 asserted claims, each Oracle product, Oracle-licensed product, Sun

product, or Sun-licensed product that practiced the claim."



It seems that Judge Alsup is really on top of this matter. I get the impression

that Oracle would sometimes rather neglect the fact that it is standing in Sun's

shoes and is bound by Sun's actions (as well as having the benefits of others of

Sun's actions). This would be reminiscent of SCO's similar neglect of

inconvenient history, but this judge is clearly not buying it. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: jpvlsmv on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:33 AM EST

This has been tumbling around in my head for a while, but when Novell entered

into the patent cross-licensing deal with Microsoft (for their Linux

implementation), should it have started marking its distribution with the

licensed patents?



As I've understood what Google is saying here, Sun was required to mark its and

licensee's products with the relevant patent numbers, or else damages only

accrue from the time of "actual notice".



If Microsoft has licensed its patents for use by Novell (Suse) Linux, and Suse

Linux isn't marked, doesn't that make it a lot harder to threaten the whole

Linux ecosystem with patents (or at least a lot harder to collect beeelions of

dollars from it)?



--Joe [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Henning Makholm on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:36 AM EST

Seems like Google is being pushed into a catch-22 here. Will they be allowed to say something like: Actually we think that neither Android nor any Sun product practices such-and-such claim, because blah de blah. However, if Oracle can get the court to agree that Android does, then we'd like to argue that Sun product sucn-and-such practices it at least as much (because, again, blah de blah). or do they have to choose in advance which defense theory to rely on? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 10:59 AM EST

First up Orcale has to identify any Oracle/Sun products it believes practice the

claims.



OK, I'm with that ... Alsup is just getting them to nail things down, so we all

know where we are.





And .. then .. this bit baffles me ... *Google* has to identify any Oracle/Sun

products that they think Orcale missed? What? Since when is it the defendants

duty to help the plaintiff flesh out their case? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 11:05 AM EST

"By DECEMBER 30, 2011, counsel for Google shall respond and identify any

further products by Oracle or Sun that practiced any of the 26 asserted claims,

specifying with particularity which ones and why."



Err ... "Your Honour, we do not have access to the entire Oracle codebase,

so it is difficult to make such an assesment at this point, however, if they

will give us complete access to their version control systems, source code and

developer notes, we will certainly have a look"



I'm still baffled as to why Google has to help Oracle identify infringed

products, thats Oracles task! [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: tknarr on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 01:04 PM EST

Why do I get the feeling that BSF was involved long before Oracle formally hired them on? The tap-dance Oracle did with the mirrored claims feels a lot like the tap-dancing we saw in SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell: any fancy step that'll keep things alive one iteration longer. And the miscalculations feel the same too. In SCO v. IBM it felt like the lawyers believed that the merits of the case didn't matter, and they badly misjudged how seriously IBM would take the allegations and how willing they'd be to fight them. It feels the same way here, like Oracle expected Google to not put up a defense and is unprepared to counter even the obvious defenses except by delay. And the lawyers appear to have misjudged the judge as well. They seem to have thought that Judge Alsup would be as killing as Judge Kimball to give them the benefit of the doubt. But Judge Alsup seems to have more on his plate, and doesn't have a lot of patience for people who aren't getting to the point. And Oracle just weren't expecting that and aren't adjusting their strategy to match, just as BSF appeared unable to handle IBM digging in rather than coughing up like any of their previous targets. [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 06:45 PM EST

Google has achieved an interesting bonus by winning this one. Not only have they

forced Oracle to identify products that they say practice the patents, which by

Oracle's admission we know will not have been marked, but this will give Google

some specific ammunition in their attempts to assert prior art and

non-infringement.



For example, take the '104 Claim 11. That is a reissue of a patent originally

filed in 1992, with James Gosling listed as the inventor. Clearly it is about

the mechanism for resolving and caching symbolic references in the interpreter

at runtime that was a design decision of the JVM interpreter from the very first

versions.



Any attempt by Oracle to claim that the Java VM does not practice this will have

to make use of arguments that will apply to showing that the Dalvik VM doesn't

practice it. If Oracle admits to practicing it, then they lose on the damages

calculation, but as we already know, the Java products were not marked.



Aside from the damages aspect, by identifying a specific product that uses the

patent claim, Google will be able to compare the source code of the Java VM and

the Android code to show how Java implements the elements of the claim and

Android does not. When the trial deals with the red underlined portion of '104

Claim 11 where is says "certain of said instructions containing one or more

symbolic references" Google will be able to show what that looks like in

Java VM byte code, where the invokevirtual instruction can take a symbolic

reference as argument which is resolved and turned into a reference to the

constant pool the first time it is run, and contrast that to the Dalvik

invoke-virtual byte code instruction that takes as argument a numeric offset

into a method table.

[ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, December 02 2011 @ 06:48 PM EST

Am I reading too much into this, or does it seem to anyone else like a party in

this case is more likely to get what they want if they make things easier for

the judge (simplify the case, cause less paperwork, fit it into the existing

plan, etc.)?



I wonder if it isn't always like that to some degree, but it seems like we're

seeing a lot of that in this case. Perhaps it's a symptom of the serious lack

of federal judges?



Or maybe it's my imagination. What do the rest of you think? [ Reply to This | # ]



Authored by: vadim on Sunday, December 04 2011 @ 05:55 AM EST

Folks, I've stumbled on this document http://www.multicians.org/fjcc4.html which is from 1965 and describes Multics file system. In section 4.1 it basically describes dynamic linking process whic include replacing symbolic references with real adresses during execution of the process. In 1965!!! I think it could be interesting for the Google defence team... If somebody could alert them about this document. [ Reply to This | # ]

