USPTO Rejects Many of Oracle's Android Claims

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

[TheNinjaroach]

17 down, tens to hundreds of thousands to go.

Re:Liability

[Speare]

"Personally liable"? What kind of asshole are you? If it's truly an individual examiner's fault, maybe hold them personally accountable, such as a bad mark on their annual performance evaluation. But extracting financial restitution for multi-million dollar damages between two major corporations, from some mid-level technician doing what they thought was their job, is not reasonable. Hyperbole does not help the discourse.

Re:Liability

[robot256]

The correct answer is that the organization should absorb the costs and have internal disciplinary rules to penalize or terminate the employees in question. This is what any organization would do if they took the problem seriously.

Re:Liability

[Aladrin]

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.

Require originality bonds instead

[gregor-e]

Liability would never work. The USPTO should require all applicants to post a bond of, say, $10,000 per claim that guarantees the originality of each claim. Then there would be a period of testing time during which a team of challengers who are knowledgeable in the field would be given the opportunity to come up with an invention to satisfy the claims made. If any of the ideas they come up with is substantially similar to the invention in the application, then the challengers get the bounty for whatever claims they invalidated. If the claim challengers don't come up with a substantially similar invention, then the spark of originality is proved, the applicant is refunded their bond(s) and the patent is granted.

Re:Software Patent Rejections

[c++0xFF]

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?!?