The Failed Experiment of Software Patents

[ Thanks to E5Rebel for this link. ]

"If that sounds harsh, take a read of this document from the case that turned up recently. It's Google's response to an Oracle expert witness's estimate of how much the former should be paying the latter:

"Cockburn opines that Google, if found to infringe, would owe Oracle between 1.4 and 6.1 billion dollars -- a breathtaking figure that is out of proportion to any meaningful measure of the intellectual property at issue. Even the low end of Cockburn’s range is over 10 times the amount that Sun Microsystems, Inc. made each year for the entirety of its Java licensing program and 20 times what Sun made for Java-based mobile licensing. Cockburn’s theory is neatly tailored to enable Oracle to finance nearly all of its multi-billion dollar acquisition of Sun, even though the asserted patents and copyrights accounted for only a fraction of the value of Sun.

"It does, indeed, sound rather as if Ellison is trying to get his entire purchase price back in a single swoop."

Complete Story

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