Oracle Sues Google Over Android

[Matthew Gillen]

EndSoftPatents.org's wiki has a page on this that is pretty informative:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki?title=Oracle_v._Google_%282010,_USA%29

Looking over the actual patents at issue, I can't believe that they would
actually stand up to any sort of scrutiny, with respect to either prior art or
obviousness.  The wiki has discussions (or bickering, depending on how
charitable you feel) of prior art for all of them.  IANAL, so I don't know how
compelling that will be to a jury of non-computer-scientists, but I'm actually
kind of hoping Google goes to the mat on this one so we can find out.  Not to
mention providing a nice test case to feel out some repercussions of the
SCOTUS Bilski ruling.

I don't think they will, just because a long period of uncertainty over
something where the stakes are high can be lethal to big company.  And patent
fights can last a long time.

On the other hand, it's worth noting that IBM, Redhat, Novell and others
weathered just that kind of storm with the whole SCO mess.

So I guess it boils down to whether Google feels this is a threat to their
core business.  The good part about the SCO fiasco was that there were some
deep-pocket companies whose core business was threatened, so they felt the
need to stand up and get this resolved.

Matt