Following a jury finding that Google had not infiringed upon Oracles patents, a development described as a near disaster for the database company, Judge William Aslup has ruled that the Java APIs cannot be copyrighted. That leaves Oracle with only the 9 lines of rangeCheck code and a handfull of decompiled test files to show for the massivecourt case. CEO Larry Ellison remains confident, claiming that the aquisition of Java creator Sun has still paid for itself.
posted by Artw on Jun 1, 2012 - 41 comments

Drew Curtis' FARK.com has settled a lawsuit with a patent troll. The popular "not news" site was sued by "Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC" which held a ridiculous broad patent (6,370,535) that it claimed covered the basic concept of generating a press release online. Other sites targeted included Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, TechCrunch & Others. In the case of Fark, the suit was settled for $0. Curtis writes, "I paraphrased our best one-time settlement offer as "how about jack sh*t and go f*ck yourself."
posted by furiousxgeorge on Aug 10, 2011 - 79 comments

The end of one-click patents? The Supreme court recently handed down a decision in the case of KSR v. Teleflex requiring courts to use "common sense" in determining what is an is not "Obvious" and therefore not patentable. According to SCOTUSblog, this will greatly affect "combination" patents that involve combining two already existing ideas in a new way.
posted by delmoi on May 9, 2007 - 32 comments

Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number 5,933,841. Here's the abstract:

A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.

Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted by DragonBoy on Jan 21, 2003 - 47 comments

Adobe sues Macromedia over infringement of their patented tabbed palettes.
"Adobe filed a lawsuit against Macromedia® alleging infringement of our intellectual property, specifically our patented tabbed palette, which is a key user interface element and method invented by Adobe and incorporated into our products."
posted by captaincursor on Aug 10, 2000 - 15 comments