Google Takes a Small Step in Lodsys Patent-Troll Case 83
The Lodsys saga continues; reader WyzrdX writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Google has intervened in an ongoing intellectual property dispute between smartphone application developers and a patent-holding firm, Wired.com has learned, marking the Mountain View company's first public move to defend Android coders from a patent troll lawsuit that's cast a pall on the community. The company says it filed a request with the United States Patent and Trademark office Friday for reexamination of two patents asserted by East Texas-based patent firm Lodsys. Google's request calls for the USPTO to assess whether or not the patents' claims are valid."
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
This after Google themself take a broad patent like this [slashdot.org]?
It's not as broad as you might think. The patent applies only to "a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant", not one where the merchant's system directly uses the shipper's web service, and especially not one that uses a table from the warehouse ID and the destination postal code prefix to the expected transit time.