I do think that you are right, claim 11 is key.
For me, as a programmer, not a lawyer, it became immediately
obvious that google is not infringing, when I saw this
snippet from the claim:
"and a processor configured to execute said instructions
containing one or more symbolic references"
As you said: Dalvik is not such a 'Processor'. It is simply
not capable of dereferencing symbolic references. What it is
capable of, and what is made such a fuss over in the
hearings, is dereferencing a numerical index into a static
memory region - the constant buffer. Indirect addressing, as
tknarr put it so nicely.
And deciding if something is a symbolic reference or not is
rather easy, too. You just have to ask yourself if - you
gonna like this - the "sequence, order and structure" of
the referenced data has any bearing on the 'symbol'.
In case of dalvik it has, because 01 always refers to the
first element in memory, 02 to the second and so on. That
means, changing the order of the referenced elements in
memory REQUIRES changing references and vice versa.
With symbolic references, not. Thats one of the reasons it's
done in the first place.
So, based on this alone, and from technical standpoint,
dalvik does not infringe the 104 patent. Any reasonable
software engineer would agree (as they so often do here).
Dr. Mitchell, aparrently, doesn't want to be called that.
Reasonable. Or software engineer.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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