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Corrections here | 286 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Corrections here
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 12:57 PM EDT
So they can be fixed

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

News picks
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 12:58 PM EDT
Please make links clickable

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Tweets from the courtroom
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 01:00 PM EDT
https://twitter.com/#!/Feldegast

https://twitter .com/#!/Feldegast/oracal-vs-google-trial

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Off topic
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 01:01 PM EDT
Please make links clickable

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Comes transcribing
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 01:02 PM EDT
Thank you for your support

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Uh Oh! The '104 patent.
Authored by: PolR on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 01:32 PM EDT
The question seems to be about the '104 patent. This means they haven't kicked
it out based on dynamic resolution.

We have a very confused jury.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Total eclipse of the Sun?
Authored by: BJ on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 01:45 PM EDT
says Alsup: "everyone enjoyed watching the eclipse"

Ah, how I love it, as an amateur astronomer, that judge
Alsup knows how to bring some perspective into the mad
and sad affairs of this here the sub-lunary (almost mis-
typed there...).

bjd


[ Reply to This | # ]

The problem with lay juries
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 02:22 PM EDT

From the judge:

Symbolic reference: The term “symbolic reference” means “a reference that identifies data by a name other than the numeric memory location of the data, and that is resolved dynamically rather than statically.”

From the jury;

"Regarding symbolic reference in '104 claims, does the resolution of symbolic references need to happen immediately?"

What part of the word dynamically do they not understand?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Another problem with juries
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 02:46 PM EDT
I have been on juries, and one of the problems is that so many people feel so in
over-their-heads that they take anything the judge says as an order that they
must follow, regardless of their own common sense.

How did we get to the absurd point where Judges and Lawyers tell juries that
they are not allowed to think? I guess because Judges and lawyers really hate
juries and want to be the sole arbitrators of what the law is, so they lie to
the jurors to make them think their hands are tied. It is a sick system.

This jury's confusion is entirely due to 1) Lies told by lawyers and 2) lies
told by the judge, all in an attempt to control what is supposed to be THE
JURY's opinion.

We have no justice in the US. We have law, but not justice. It is so sad to
see a country set up with such hope and promise to be destroyed by lawyers and
judges and rampant legislative bribery.

[ Reply to This | # ]

How are average people supposed to understand
Authored by: kawabago on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 02:52 PM EDT
Expecting average people to understand what is supposedly the
cutting edge of technology is asking too much. Worse, if they
get it wrong whole technology sectors can be affected.
Technological progress does not happen in a court room, it
ends there. Intellectual Property is spiraling out of control
and will soon bring progress to a complete standstill.
Imagine not being able to buy salt because someone managed to
get it taken off the market for copyright infringement.
That's where we're heading.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Trollish Threads Here
Authored by: artp on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:22 PM EDT
In case this article brings them out like the last one did.

Checking - no, it isn't a full moon. Must have been the
topic.

---
Userfriendly on WGA server outage:
When you're chained to an oar you don't think you should go down when the galley
sinks ?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Is the judge an "expert"?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:25 PM EDT
Some of the jury questions seem to be technical in nature. Is Alsup
overstepping his authority by answering them himself?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Jury doesn't understand burden of proof is on Oracle
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:33 PM EDT
They seem to be searching for ways that the Oracle claims can
be made to fit. But they shouldn't be doing Oracle's team's
job for them. If Oracle couldn't present a clear case then
they haven't proven it.

[ Reply to This | # ]

From the Courtroom, Day 21, Oracle v. Google Trial, Jury Deliberations ~pj - Updated
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:37 PM EDT
If the jury misunderstands and thinks it can only consider Dr. Mitchell's testimony for Oracle as being somehow true, which some of the tweeting journalists thought had been told to them, they are going to have been seriously misled.

Can't the judge just come out and say that it's the whole purpose of the jury to decide the veracity of the witnesses and use their own commonsense?

His previous answer seems to try very hard be as vague as possible.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Ockham's razor
Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:44 PM EDT
It has occurred to me that if the Jury is having such a hard time deciding if
Android uses these patents there probably isn't enough proof that if does.

As I wrote before we basically have a he said he said and the jury just should
pick the expert they feel is more honest.

It does feel like the jury is somehow split.

---
Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.

"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk

[ Reply to This | # ]

transmogrified?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:45 PM EDT
Awesome.

[ Reply to This | # ]

From the Courtroom, Day 21, Oracle v. Google Trial, Jury Deliberations ~pj - Updated
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:46 PM EDT
If nothing else, this case has underscored what a hopeless mess the U.S.
legal system is. I'm so glad I don't have to live in your country.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Stack is not synonymous with memory
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 03:53 PM EDT
While the stack lives in memory, it's not the same thing. Rather, we're taught
to imagine it like a stack of plates, where you "push" new plates on
the stack and "pop" existing plates off of it. You generally use it
for temporary things or function return values and you expect it to get cleaned
off fairly regularly when programs are finished with that data. This is in
contrast with the "heap" which is where larger and usually more
permanent allocations of memory are made.

Both live in memory, but as terms of art, they're not exactly synonymous with
that.

On the other hand, it would be very strange if there were some symbolic
reference or whatever on the stack and they said it wasn't in memory. But maybe
this is just a side-effect of bamboozling the jury? It would be ironic if all
that nonsense came back to bite Oracle.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Google did a really bad job with defense on the patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 04:27 PM EDT

Google and their lawyers have done a really bad job in the patent phase. The '104 patent should have been a complete slam dunk even with Oracle's witness lying on the stand (wonder what that will cost Standford in alumnus giving ;-). They have pinned their hopes on the issue of the symbolic reference not being in the instructions, and the resolution being static not dynamic

However, there are two much bigger problems with the patent, which Oracle opened the door to in their closing statement: Oracle complained that Google had not shown the data lookup on some or other chart:

The next step in the chain is the realization that Google wasn't presenting a complete depiction of what's going on. This slide doesn't depict the actual field value; it doesn't depict the actual data object from which the data is being retrieved. What Google showed you was some intermediate steps on the way to retrieving the value. They told you to go to Courtroom 8, and they showed you going to the directory to figure out where it is, but you still have to look it up in the directory.

This requirement, that the patented invention look up the data is a huge issue and is in several of the asserted claims. The reason that Google does not show this is because if dexopt tried to look up the actual data it would crash, because that data does not exist.

The reason for that is the much more fundamental problem that all of the asserted claims require the patented invention to be executing the code at the time of transformation. dexopt is not executing the code. Dalvik executes the code, and Dalvik does not transform instructions or do any code rewriting.

If the patent language can be mangled to imply that the time of execution and the time of look-up can be separated, then the patent is doing nothing more that standard static linking, which has been done since at least 1959, according to Wikipedia. I think Google hoped that the dynamic part would cover that...

A good illustration for this is when you are waiting in a line at the window in a bank, and the line is long and they have someone going over the forms you have, and then redirecting you to someone else who can handle that type of query more effectively. The teller is the machine doing the execution, the person helping presort is the optimizer.

On the '520 patent, they did a better job, but they should have pushed home the point that simulation requires that feeding in different but equivalent inputs requires getting the same output, but pattern matching does not. Then asked why dexopt failed in the tests with tweaked input.

Regards,
  -Jeremy

[ Reply to This | # ]

Update 3
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 04:34 PM EDT
The answer to the jury's question is obviously 'No'. The demonstratives
include all of the data structures involved in resolving a field reference, in
addition to the instructions.

[ Reply to This | # ]

if something matches 3 out of 4 claims, is that infringement?
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 04:52 PM EDT
This text is from Rachel's tweet: "if something matches 3 out of 4 claims, is that infringement?" The judge answers, no.

I think the question must have been "if something matches 3 out of 4 parts of a claim, is that infringement?" A device doesn't need to match all claims in order to infringe. It's often logically impossible to match all claims simultaneously since they're often written to cover mutually exclusive alternatives.

For example, the patent may say the invention covers anything that:

  • (claim 1): A and B
  • or (claim 2): A and not B and C
  • or (claim 3): A and C and D
  • or ...
Nothing can match both claim 1 and claim 2. Anything that matches all parts of any single one of the claims is potentially infringing.

[ Reply to This | # ]

From the Courtroom, Trial Day 21, Jury Deliberations, Court Frustrations - Updated 3.1417Xs
Authored by: webster on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 04:59 PM EDT
.

At this point the Judge is clearly frustrated. They have 21 days and no real
decision. That is 21 past days wasted in his courtroom, and about that many
days in the future to try and resolve the same questions.

We are months away from the re-run of fair use. Will patents join again? Will
he reserve his API decision until all other issues are resolved? We may be less
than halfway before this is even final for appeal.

Given his experience and programming knowledge, he has his own firm belief on
the issues. If the jury doesn't agree with him, do not be surprised if he
overrules them.

.

[ Reply to This | # ]

If there is a mistrial on patents also ...
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 05:33 PM EDT
... and this all goes to a new trial -- does that throw out
the summary judgments on the other patents as well? Does
everything start from scratch again?

I don't know if it's good or bad for Google, but it's looking
more and more like nothing will be accomplished by this
particular trial and it's all going to start over again.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Ahm. Back on SoapBox -- Juries and Tech
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 08:48 PM EDT
Assumption 1. Juries are not going to go away. American law is built around
them. American political theory requires them.

Assumption 2. Juries are going to continue to be screened to remove
technological knowledge relevant to the case at trial. The theory of juries
requires X numbers of equal deliberators, not one or two 'experts' and a herd of
followers. Thus 'mixed' juries are worse than uninformed ones.

Assumption 3. There will not be 'blue-ribbon' juries composed of selected
experts for technical cases. If you think voir-dire is bad now, consider doing
it to technically select a specialist jury. Shudder.

HERE'S THE PROBLEM (In Theory)
The jury has to begin in a state of technical ignorance.
BUT
The jury has to be able to deliberate and decide precisely the technical
questions they were selected to be ignorant about.

SOLUTION (In Theory)
The parties' lawyers through the adversarial presentation of evidence will
provide sufficient information for the jury to understand the technology and
decide the issue...
IF THEY (the lawyers) ARE ALLOWED AS MUCH TIME AS IT TAKES TO PRESENT ALL THAT
EVIDENCE.

REALITY
Judges, as this judge has done, have started to aggressively manage their trial
times because they have to. This judge set fixed time allotments for each party
and those allotments were markedly too small for the technologies in question.
We, the interested non-party public, the parties and the judge now have a mess,
and the poor jurors are drowning in it.

CONCLUSION (Jumped to)
EITHER
a) the judge allows the lawyers to talk talk talk talk annnd talk, on open time
allotments so that ALL THE TECHNICAL BACKGROUND IS INTRODUCED,
OR
b) the judge has to arrange for the technical education of the jury before the
lawyers start spouting their technical whatever.

OTHERWISE
Trials that involve technical issues will continue to turn into roulette without
the wheel.

/endrant

Thank you for your interest in judical reform
Please put donations in the coffee can

obviously not a lawyer
JG

[ Reply to This | # ]

What a stack is, and concerning resolution
Authored by: wvhillbilly on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 02:13 AM EDT
Stack is a portion of memory set aside for temporary storage of values, such as
when the program needs to access the operating system, and needs to preserve the
present state of the various processor registers. The usual way to do this was
to call a subroutine which pushed (copied) the values from the various registers
onto the stack in sequence, and then made a call to the required system
function. On return, these values would be popped (copied back) off the stack to
the processor registers in reverse order (stack access is first in, last out) to
restore the registers to the same state they were in before the system call,
then control returned to the program at the next instruction past the call to
the subroutine. Standard operating procedure.

As for resolving memory addresses, the only fixed address we used was 100h, the
starting location for the program. The source code was written entirely with
mnemonics, words representing processor instructions. Subroutines or other
memory locations were identified with labels, words representing memory
locations. On assembly the assembler assigned memory locations for each
instruction, converted the instruction mnemonics into binary code and resolved
the address of the various labels into the physical memory addresses where they
were located in the assembled program. Again, S.O.P. I suppose this is what
Oracle defines as static resolution.

Another thing that was done was lookup tables. I once wrote a small print
driver for an Okidata 92 printer in 8080 assembler using these lookup tables
where one could embed tags in text to access subroutines to change fonts and the
like. The program would convert these tags into a location in the lookup table,
then copy the value from that location in the lookup table into the address
register and jump to that address, where the instruction for the desired
function was in the program. I'm thinking this is what Oracle is defining as
dynamic resolution. Again this was S.O.P. for programming in assembler and all
contained in a book I had purchased for the purpose of learning programming in
assembly language. As I recall, this was back in the late 80s or early 90s. A
long time ago, anyway.
I did it on a DEC Rainbow with CP/M if that tells you anything about the time.

I wonder, could this be used as prior art to invalidate Oracle's patent on
dynamic linking?


---
"It is written." always trumps, "Um, ah, well, I thought..."

[ Reply to This | # ]

Symbolic references - update 5
Authored by: PolR on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 04:26 AM EDT
It seems that the jury, judges and the parties tripped on the very issue that
was controversial among us a couple articles ago when we discussed Dr Mitchell
testimony. If the instruction contains a pointer to something that is symbolic
or to a structure which contains something symbolic, is it a symbolic reference?
After how many indirections does a reference stop being symbolic?

if i remember well, we didn't agree among ourselves on this. There were sensible
arguments for several answers.

The particular algorithm claimed by the patent is obscure. It is not possible to
know exactly what is being claimed from the words of the patent alone. The jury
is struggling to find where are the boundaries of the patent so they can tell
whether or not there is infringement. But nobody can tell them that because this
patent has no clear boundary.

Add to this the misleading testimony of Dr Mitchell on what is dynamic execution
and what is a simulated execution and this jury has an intractable problem on
their hand. I believe a hung jury would be a reasonable outcome because they are
being asked unanswerable questions.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Random
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 10:24 AM EDT
It is almost funny. All those lawyers. All that paper. All
the erudite scholarship and carefully contrived arguments.
All that fuss and bother and expense reduces to this. A jury
of ignorant mushrooms will fill the jury form out based on
some random process. Perhaps they'll toss a coin.

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • Random - Authored by: PolR on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 10:34 AM EDT
Patent System issues go far beyond software
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 01:42 PM EDT

And any "fix" to clear software only out, won't fix the problems.

In my opinion, the entire Patent System needs to be "rebooted",
anything
less will make the problems worse.

Wayne
Http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | # ]
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