USPTO Rejects Many of Oracle's Android Claims 154
sfcrazy writes "In yet another setback for Oracle, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. Groklaw reports, 'In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent's 21 claims.'"
Software Patent Rejections (Score:5, Insightful)
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Can anyone tell whether those 4 remaining claims were independent claims or dependent claims? The dependent claims aren't worth much if the independent claims on which they depend are rendered invalid.
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According to one poster on Groklaw, no dependent claims remain. The surviving claims are 8, 9, 17, and 18, which depend on 7, 8, 15, and 16 respectively. I haven't verified this.
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First, IANAL.
The surviving claims are 8, 9, 17, and 18, which read as follows [google.com]:
8. The method of claim 7, wherein:
the method further includes the step of setting a flag associated with said first routine to indicate that said first routine is privileged; and
the step of determining that said next routine is said first routine includes determining that a flag associated with said next routine indicates said next routine is privileged.
9. The method of claim 8, wherein the step of setting said flag associated with said first routine includes setting a flag in a frame in said calling hierarchy associated with said thread.
17. The computer readable medium of claim 16, wherein:
the computer readable medium further comprises one or more instructions for performing the step of setting a flag associated with said first routine to indicate that said first routine is privileged; and
the step of determining that said next routine is said first routine includes determining that a flag associated with said next routine indicates said next routine is privileged.
18. The computer readable medium of claim 17, wherein the step of setting said flag associated with said first routine includes setting a flag in a frame in said calling hierarchy associated with said thread.
My understanding is that all four of these claims are dependent claims, but I'll leave it for others more knowledgeable in patent law to comment.
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Wow, flags! Who would ever think to use those?
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More accurately (if I understand the process right), the specific prior art provided by Google didn't use flags. Maybe these last couple of claims would be invalid if they submitted that prior art? Or maybe they can now claim that those parts are obvious? I'm not totally sure how the process works.
Re:Software Patent Rejections (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction: 46 down, 122 to go [groklaw.net].
There's seven patents in question, with a total of 168 claims being made. 17 of those claims from one patent were just rejected. Two other patents were also examined with claims rejected. Groklow projects that a total of about 48 claims will survive after all is said and done. After that, the question is how many of those 48 are independent claims.
Surprising statistic: over 90% of claims are rejected when reexamined. Really?!?
Let's see Florian Muller spin this ... (Score:3)
Let's see Florian Muller spin this ...
Liability (Score:4, Interesting)
It looks like costly mistakes were made by the USPTO. In a fair world, the original patent examiners should be held personally liable for all of Google's legal fees in this matter. That lesson would most likely make them take a little more care to properly evaluate the next bogus patent application that crosses their desks, before millions of dollars of unnecessary costs are created.
Re:Liability (Score:5, Interesting)
If patent examiners would be "liable" then you can as well ask that judges should be ...
What I mean is: if people working for any government agency would be liable (and not the agency or the government) then all those agencies would come to a grinding halt.
Or even more likely no one would want to work for them ...
Re:Liability (Score:4, Insightful)
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Correct, but in this case, does 'the organization' operate at a profit? I think they operate at a loss, which means the taxpayer will be covering the costs.
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Correct, but in this case, does 'the organization' operate at a profit? I think they operate at a loss, which means the taxpayer will be covering the costs.
The taxpayer *should* cover the costs, since the taxpayers created this out-of-control system of government-granted entitlements in the first place, and they keep reelecting politicians who protect it.
If the government built a dam above your house, and then it ruptured, would it be fair to make you eat the costs of your destroyed property? Of course not. The taxpayers would be expected to foot the bill for the mistake. Maybe next time they'd take care to elect a government that provided better oversight.
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The taxpayer *should* cover the costs, since the taxpayers created this out-of-control system of government-granted entitlements in the first place, and they keep reelecting politicians who protect it.
Of those taxpayers, many may well have opposed both the entitlements and the politicians responsible; they shouldn't be punished simply for being in the minority. Responsibility for the consequences lies exclusively with those whose actions contributed to the damage.
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Where would you draw the line? Recording who votes for which candidates who vote for what laws which establish agencies who damage property? Even aside from the secrecy of votes, that's too complex and too prone to mistakes.
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Personally, I would draw the line at treating governments any different from normal private co-ops. In other words, if an agency causes damage you sue them directly, and if they can't pay up out of their own resources (or insurance, etc.) then they go bankrupt. Those who want their services pay them directly, and anyone who doesn't has no obligation to do so. No externalized costs or special immunity.
Short of that, yes, I would advocate holding people directly and publicly responsible for who they empower a
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That doesn't sound like government, it sounds like privatization. That could be a dangerous idea. Imagine if you had to subscribe to police services, for example. And it'd be really bad if the local police went bankrupt and left a town without police.
Who would decide which elected officials should have their voters...punished? Besides, we vote for lots of officials who then go against their campaign promises or ignore their electorate's wishes. Then what? People aren't allowed to vote anymore?
And with
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Correct, but in this case, does 'the organization' operate at a profit? I think they operate at a loss, which means the taxpayer will be covering the costs.
The taxpayer *should* cover the costs, since the taxpayers created this out-of-control system of government-granted entitlements in the first place, and they keep reelecting politicians who protect it.
If the government built a dam above your house, and then it ruptured, would it be fair to make you eat the costs of your destroyed property? Of course not. The taxpayers would be expected to foot the bill for the mistake. Maybe next time they'd take care to elect a government that provided better oversight.
Agreed. Government should bear the costs for failures in the systems it operates, e.g. picking up the fees and reimbursing awards related to invalidated patents/patent claims. That should be part of the budget in the US PTO; only then will Congress get the picture and probably solve the real problem.
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What I mean is: if people working for any government agency would be liable (and not the agency or the government) then all those agencies would come to a grinding halt.
Or even more likely no one would want to work for them ...
A plan with no drawbacks!
I want to see the military have to hold a bake sale and all that.
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Yes, like the days before the abomination that is income tax. I think they were called bond sales though.
Re:I want to see the military hold a bake sale (Score:2)
The Cake is a Weapon!
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Easier solution: get the government out of it, so that multiple private agencies could compete, both for the registration of their novel ideas, and for adjudication where a party claims damages.
Monopolies generally suck. Governments, by definition, create monopolies of every product or service they touch.
And yes, thinking like this will eventually make you an anarcocapitalist [freekeene.com]
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Easier solution: get the government out of it, so that multiple private agencies could compete, both for the registration of their novel ideas, and for adjudication where a party claims damages.
Right. So who has standing to adjudicate a dispute? Who figures that out? A government? So there you are, right back to that abhorrent concept. Oh, I get it, you want the government to shield a private company so it can make some money out of this..... Hey, works for ICANN [slashdot.org], I suppose it could work for Mr. Wu's Superior Patent Filing Company. But. But. I filed my patent application with GoDaddy Patents. They don't recognize Mr. Wu. Now what do I do? Hire another lawyer?
Go read something other than
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There's no need to rely on a monopoly government. The question "who has standing" depends on the rules of the specific arbitration organization you're dealing with.
Huh? So if I'm not a member of any of the organizations I can infringe on any of the patents?
Saying there's no need to rely on a monopoly government does not make sense at all. Whether I'm a member or not, who is going to make me stop infringing?
a) The Government?
b) The armed employees/contractors of the organizations?
c) Nobody can force me to stop?
d) My customers who are not getting an inferior product?
Governments are entities that maintain a monopoly on violence in a particular zone. Whoever gets to force
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Who said anything about voting? Not me.
And yes, if you're not a member of any org, you can infringe all you like. Problem is, nobody is defending you from infringement.
This is the basis that American governments were founded on, but those principles have been totally lost. "When men enter into a state of society, they surrender up some of their natural rights to that society, in order to ensure the protection of others; and, without such an equivalent, the surrender is void." [nh.gov]
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And yes, if you're not a member of any org, you can infringe all you like. Problem is, nobody is defending you from infringement.
That's not always a problem.
1) What happens if companies in China infringe on your patents in USA, but the Chinese Gov prevents you from infringing on their patents when you're in China ;).
2) Your proposal is in effect abolishing patents. Most businesses and people don't need patents protected to make money. The reason why they make money is not because of their patents. So they would not be members. I'm fine with the abolition of patents[1], but that's a pretty convoluted way of doing it.
[1] I personally t
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If you don't like your elected Government you should try to get them voted out. Be thankful for that chance. You would have no option of voting Emperor Ellison or His Highness S
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Just take this:
Dr. Mary Ruwart shows how force has dangerous unintended consequences, and how only by honoring our neighborâ(TM)s choices will we solve the worldâ(TM)s problems
In other words: "The world would be such a nice place if only everyone was nice". That's not what I call insightful or useful.
If your system only works if everyone is nice, then it doesn't work in practice.
What happens when someone stops honoring everyone else's choices and only cares for his private army with more firepower than everyone else in that district?
Who is going to stop him? Or are you going to honor his choice of gunning you down, taking your property, enslaving your women and chi
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democratically elected Government is easier to overthrow without force. If the voters vote differently, the Government is "overthrown".
How's that working out for you?
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Easier solution: get the government out of it, so that multiple private agencies could compete, both for the registration of their novel ideas, and for adjudication where a party claims damages.
You've just outlined the credit ratings agencies [wikipedia.org], ya know, the ones who happily stamped AAA on complete financial garbage and helped cause the subprime-fueled credit crisis? The ones which are considered an oligopoly anyway?
The problem isn't just the government, it's the money and corruption that forces government agencies into regulatory capture (among other things: the revolving door between government agency staff, and the corporations that are regulated and supply the government).
The problem can almost
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Re:Liability (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why not? Doctors are held personally liable for their mistakes. This kind of mistake costs real people at real businesses millions of dollars. Some are even driven out of existence, with careers and life savings destroyed in the process. Why should they suffer?
If nobody will work under those conditions, let the USPTO buy malpractice insurance for their examiners. When the premiums go through the roof on an individual who keeps screwing up, then the patent office will have a good incentive to fire him.
Re:Liability (Score:4, Insightful)
Doctors get paid a lot more money. Doctors are virtually forced to buy insurance to cover those liabilities, too.
If we made the patent examiners individually liable, they would have to also buy insurance, which would mean we'd have to pay them more to cover it. In the end, it doesn't help -us-. It just costs us money.
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Real bargain in my eyes compared to all the court costs and wasted time with companies fighting each other rather than competing to producing new and better products. In a fight like this nobody wins but the lawyers. Pay the PTO examiners $500k Pay them $1M, attract the best and brightest possible. Allow a PTO examiner to build a team of researchers with their income, or do it 100% themselves. Hold them accountable for their work. I don't think it's too much to ask.
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Pay the PTO examiners $500k Pay them $1M, attract the best and brightest possible.
Since these guys are paid with our taxes I assume you are willing to pay double the amount of income tax to cover this massive pay hike?
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did you not finish reading the post? It'll be more than made up for in savings elsewhere.
Make the patent applicants pay (Score:2)
Of course the applicants should pay the examination costs. If it amounts to millions of dollars per patent, so be it. The patents held by "little guys", at least, do not seem to be doing much good to society these days anyways.
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Please read at least the first 50 words of a post before posting replies. Thx.
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I think that makes this a perfect analogy then, because holding the individual examiners responsible would have exactly the same effect. Their insurance would cover them and everything would continue as normal.
Re:Liability (Score:5, Informative)
Why not? Doctors are held personally liable for their mistakes.
Hahahahah seriously, you believe that?
Preface: my wife is a doctor.
My wife never even SEEs her malpractice insurance bill, the group she works for pays it. Second, assuming they kill a man, intentionally, and its proven in court, the absolute WORST thing that happens to them ... they can't practice medicine again ... IN THAT STATE, they just go somewhere else. Insurance pays the bill. They get boarded in the new state, and go one continuing to be a shitty doctor. Maybe they can't practice in California, because they bother to look at things like that, but thats just California, no body else does (well, no body else where you'd actually want to live, North Dakota and those states might, never bothered looking). The feds really don't give a flying fuck, the state boards are the ones that pull licenses.
Doctors are no more liable than I am if you shoot your wife. They are supposed to be, but theory and reality are entirely different in most cases, especially this one.
Doctors are even less liable than drivers. Drivers of cars are required to have insurance as well, but you're a lot more likely to go to jail for doing something stupid in a car than any doctor.
I've seen doctors get their license revoked for being complete scumbags in our state, literally move their office 2 blocks down the street, to the other side of the state line, and open up for business a week later. We're talking about a doctor who prescribed drugs at levels that were unacceptable to any other doctor, gave out pain pills like there was no tomorrow (I know people who have signed prescription pads from the guy so they could refill themselves.), put people on long term IV antibiotics and destroy their bodies in various ways, and flat out lie about all of it, with video and audio taped evidence ...
The ONLY, and I do mean ONLY reason he lost his license? The BlueCross and BlueShield were tired of paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient every month. Not because of all the bad shit he was doing, not because he was hurting people, but because the insurance company of patients didn't want to pay anymore.
The idea that doctors are liable is about as funny as the idea that politicians are liable for what they do.
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Leaving aside the tone of and extreme, unsupported claims of your post, you qualified the whole thing by saying that your wife works for a large group.
None of that is true for self-employed doctors or smaller groups.
The system is fundamentally broken.
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Sounds like a brilliant way to make more money for attorneys.
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No, they aren't.
They are held personally responsible for failing to practice at the "level at which an ordinary, prudent professional having the same training and experience in good standing in a same or similar community would practice under the same or similar circumstances" (not the average professional of those descriptions, but essentially the minimum level at which an 'ordinary, prudent' professional would operate.)
The vast majority of all
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Why? It is just taxpayers money. There is always more where that came from.
No, I don't really beleive that, but many government workers seem to operate as if they do.
On the contrary, most 'government workers' are struggling to meet the incredible demands of a public which wants all sorts of services but refuses to pay for it. The average government agency is far under-budgeted and far under-staffed for the work required of it.
There are, of course, individuals who don't do a good job, are not well qualified, or are simply burned out and cynical. It's difficult to replace people like that, though, since hardly anyone wants to be overworked and underpaid, and simply firi
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I suspect that there are many overpaid fat cat bureaucrats, but that they are vastly outnumbered by the legions you mention. But even though they may be a small minority, there are still plenty of them.
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Why not? In many countries, Washington Accord [wikipedia.org] qualified engineers are held personally liable for their mistakes, just like doctors (and therefore carry liability insurance).
If patents are so gosh-darn important, I don't see why we employ "mid-level technicians" to review them.
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In a fair world, the original patent examiners should be held personally liable for all of Google's legal fees in this matter.
Yeah, that will fix the patent process for sure. Implement that rule and you will have exactly zero patents issued moving forward.
There is no way a patent examiner will have perfect knowledge, and having an expectation that they will is not reasonable. There is nothing "fair" about your concept.
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Yeah, that will fix the patent process for sure. Implement that rule and you will have exactly zero patents issued moving forward.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
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If you are someone who creates new things, the inability to patent and protect your invention greatly reduces the incentive to continue your work, bringing your invention to market and likely employing others.
If you are someone who lives off of the ideas of others, cannot comprehend that patents protect the small guys just as they do the mega-corporations, and are bitter that some get ahead while you do not, then by all means, shut inventors down and kill the economic benef
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What if you're someone who creates new things, then has them forcefully confiscated by a troll wielding a bunch of invalid patents that you can't afford to contest? That's a bigger injustice than anything you have presented.
Just like they say about criminal cases, it would be better to have 100 valid patents rejected than for the patent office to approve a single invalid patent.
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When you make the game completely fair, you reduce it to the least common denominator (usually much lower than what you thought it would be), such that no one wants to play anymore. Your proposed cure is worse than the disease.
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It's hard to see how the software patent situation could possibly get any worse than it is.
Many more people have been bankrupted and/or put out of work than people like you have been helped by software patents. I'm sorry, but if you were to lose your government entitlement, it would be a small price to pay to restore sanity to the software industry.
The software industry was a thriving field long before the courts legislated software patents into existence from the bench. They're just not necessary.
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the inability to patent and protect your invention greatly reduces the incentive to continue your work, bringing your invention to market and likely employing others.
Unless your idea is very truly novel (very rare among patents) your invention is something that people other than you can and will come up with. You just happened to come up with it first. Inventions were invented, brought to market, and sold for profit long before patents existed. They will continue whether patents exist or not. Is there a way for patents to be implemented without the ridiculousness that exists today? I'm sure there is. But right now, patents hurt creativity and hinder invention much more
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Unless your idea is very truly novel (very rare among patents) your invention is something that people other than you can and will come up with.
Nothing is novel once you demonstrate the concept and sell your product for others to copy. Even the most novel idea will be copied almost immediately.
You just happened to come up with it first.
If something was so obvious that it will certainly be invented, why didn't it exist before it was invented?
Inventions were invented, brought to market, and sold for profit long before patents existed.
Very often with the inventor getting little or nothing out of the idea. What would we have now if inventors in those days could have protected their ideas? Would discovery have moved even faster?
They will continue whether patents exist or not.
Likely to some extent, but innovation will certainly suf
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but innovation will certainly suffer if innovators are assured to lose benefit from their work.
You make the assumption that without patents innovators are 'assured' to lose benefit from their work. Yet the people who make the most money on 'inventions' nowadays aren't the small inventor who created something. It's the company who purchases the patent from the inventor and the companies who troll with their patents. The only industry I know well enough to comment in this context is the software industry, and It's very easy to see right now how patents have slowed innovation in this industry. Software
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That sentence is a nightmare and I think I understand what you are trying to ask, considering that you're basically asking me why something didn't exist...before it existed.
I did write the sentence poorly as a demonstration of the poor logic I was paraphrasing, which you continued to expand upon. One of the tests of securing a patent is the obviousness of the invention. If obvious, it is not patentable. However, yo
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If you build your house in a prime location, should i get to come live in it without paying any construction costs or rent just because I would have built a similar house there if I would have found the property first?
Having an idea that is the obvious solution to a particular problem is in no way analogous to building a house.
However, you argue that almost everything is obvious IF someone has the knowledge/skill and IF they think to identify the problem and IF they choose to solve the problem, concluding they will identify the same invention. Yeah, great, but they did not, so it is indeed not obvious.
My argument was that most things that are being given patents, specifically dealing with software because that's what I know, are things that were obvious to any programmer given that particular problem. Why would someone working on a completely different product or program spend their time to work on a completely unrelated issue? For example, you're a manufacturer of cars. Now, if you wanted to ma
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Sarcasm fail. Personal liability would indeed go a long way towards fixing the process.
Do doctors cease to practice because they are liable for their mistakes?
They do not. They take out insurance, and they do a better job.
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Require originality bonds instead (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do you get mad at your computer when it pukes on crap code? No. Patent law ( Hell, nearly ALL LAW ) is written so ambiguously and so subject to interpretation that it's almost impossible to parse it. They call it "legalese" for a reason friend.
Lawyers and politicians are something we programmers will never understand because they revel in creating the one thing we seek to remove - ambiguity. We do this because machines cannot parse ambiguous code.
Humans will try though - it's what we do - and no two hum
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I dont think you want to work in a world where every employee bears the full brunt of liability-- unless of course you happen to be one of those rare people who never makes any mistakes, of course.
In a fair world, the employees get terminated.
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What he should mean is that all patents should be rejected outright upfront and only approved when the patent applicant can prove that the requested patent is really novel and there's no prior art. It should be up to the applicant to prove his patent not just submit the patent. He has to prove his process, like school kids are required to prove their work in long hand. Cheating the system and lying or deceiving should result in them being fined and their patent given to the public domain and all derivati
A few porcupine quills removed (Score:2)
It only takes one claim on one patent to become a significant and expensive problem.
Oracle may have had some of it's ability to negotiate for an out of court settlement shot down, but I don't see why this is a win for Google. Fewer claims remain but still the same number of patents in dispute.
Beyond "it's not a loss", can a nice slashdotter enlighten me what this really means?
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Well, it's more complex than that, once you include the distinction between independent and dependent claims. The independent claims are those with "teeth," so to speak. Of three patents that have had claims rejected, only one has an independent claim left.
Once the reexamination is complete, Oracle still has to prove that Google infringed on the remaining claims. The fewer claims that survive, the harder it will be to prove infringement. Out of court settlement becomes more likely, too.
Even if, in the e
What damages has Oracle suffered? (Score:2)
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Sun/Oracle gives java away for free. Even if Google has infringed a patent, how has that resulted in any loss of money to Oracle?
Java for mobile devices has always required a paid license. (not free, never was and still isn't)
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Java for mobile devices. Please try to keep up.
Java is just the lever (Score:2)
Sun/Oracle gives java away for free. Even if Google has infringed a patent, how has that resulted in any loss of money to Oracle?
As others have said, it doesn't matter, patents are monopolies backed by force - infringing the monopoly is sufficient.
But don't forget, this isn't about Java at all, it's about forcing Google into a cross-licensing deal on their database technology. Oracle's legacy databases are toast and they know it. SPARC buys them some time, but they really need Google's database patents, s
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Oracle also bought Sun to get Java to piss off IBM, a major competitor of theirs.
But Oracle has damn near brought Sun to a point where it will fork and become considerably less valuable.
Oracle also got SPARC (which it has talked about killing), Solaris (which it is killing), MySQL (which it wants to bury for competing with Oracle DB), and OpenOffice (which it is killing/handing over to Apache).
Whoever pushed for the acquisition of Sun should be promptly fired over at Oracle. All they've received for their b
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It has been a while since I first read up on the suit, but I believe you can use Java on PCs for free without problem. But Oracle (and Sun before them) made money licensing JVMs on other platforms, such as mobile phones, BluRay players, etc.
What I'm confused by is that Java was licensed under the GPL. The GPL stipulates you can't impose other restrictions. I know that Oracle owns the copyright to Java, and can change the license away from the GPL at any time for future releases. But wouldn't the previous GP
17/21 (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
As the IRA once said: "You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once."
They only need one claim in one patent to survive to cause a world of hurt.
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Oracle actually stands to potentially lose a lot of money here. They make money licensing Java JVMs for mobile devices, BluRay players, etc.
Let's say that Oracle wins on one claim on one patent, and they want a piece of every Android device sold to date. The judge can rule that it wouldn't be the full licensing fee for the Oracle JVM, since they're using Davlik. It is a question of damages based on that one patent infringement.
Google pays a one-time fee, and then Davlik is coded around that one patent claim
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He has to eat too. Florian, Rush, Beck and the rest of the professional trolls have to make a living just like everyone else.
Re:3... 2.... 1... (Score:4, Funny)
That makes correcting the flaws in humanity they represent relatively easy. Take away their food.
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Conclusion incorrect. Perhaps you should re-take your stats class.
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Eh, it's not the OP's math. That was the number spun on Groklaw's site. While it's technically correct the way it's worded on Groklaw makes it sound better than it actually is. Contrary to popular belief, Groklaw, while an awesome resource on our side, it isn't entirely unbiased.
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That's only for the claims that were subject to reexamination. Of the 66 total claims from three patents so far for which stats were released, 16 claims were not subject to reexamination. Now, 46 out of the 50 that were reexamined were rejected which gives us about 92%. However, of the original 66, 20 still stand so it's more like 66%. Still, it's better than 10% or 0...
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That alone ought to sound warning bells to even those who support the patenting system that it really is broken.
All that money spent, and most of it wasted on nothing (literally nothing).
Bad enough for huge companies that fund their own full time patenting departments. Even worse for small startups that can barely afford one or two patents.
So much for patents protecting innovation. I'm not considering patenting my innovations. I honestly don't see the point.
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Considering how valuable patents are to companies, I'd think something with such a high failure rate would be much more of a "toxic asset" than any sort of mortgage product.
Then again, maybe the value of a patent is more psychological (i.e. FUD) than tangible anyway. Just don't let that patent go to court, or it might lose all value.
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No, because a re-exam is only performed when a requestor first shows that there is a "substantial new question of patentability". In other words, there is a selection bias that causes claims only to be re-examined when it is likely that at least some of them will be rejected. If a potential infringer can't dig up any prior art, they won't request a re-exam (or it won't be granted based on whatever bogus prior art they submit).
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Sure, it is. It's the logical fallacy of not knowing what the fuck you're talking about.
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Also, it is so risky that patent insurance, if at all available, costs far more than the patent is worth.
This is true of all forms of insurance, regardless of what its form.
Insurance providers aren't in business to lose money.
Auto insurance is a great example, most drivers claim very little over their lifetime yet pay tremendous amounts. Within 15-20 years of driving, you'll have paid the insurance companies more than your insurance is worth at maximum payout in almost every case. And under no circumstances will you EVER get maximum payout.
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What idiot modded this up?
Read the Groklaw link. Four claims survived the reexamination process, none of which (I believe, but IANAL) are independent claims and are pretty much worthless.
Previously, one other patent was effectively invalidated in a similar fashion, and another one had just one independent claim survive. And they're not even done reexamining the patents yet!
Lastly, you apparently have no clue what FUD is. What fear? What uncertainty? What doubt? Read what others have said about this ca