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| Authored by: bugstomper on Tuesday, May 22 2012 @ 09:56 PM EDT |
"If you can't take the patent literally, then how are you supposed to
interpret it - with your imagination?"
I think that question has helped me clarify how I am thinking about this.
My answer is - IANAL, and that is a legal question about claim construction. The
judge should be able to answer that. I think it is unfair to the jury that this
was not hashed out during the claim construction phase, instead left to be
ambiguous. Google argues that the claim means what it literally says, Oracle
argues the opposite. Google has the literal words of the claim on their side.
Oracle has whatever is allowed to be used of common sense and reasoning from the
rest of the patent to correct for unintended limiting language of claims.
I'm not taking either side about the legal issue of claim construction. I wish
the judge had.
I do think that the whole patent is silly. I do think that Google should have a
slam dunk case about this patent because of the requirement in the claims that
interpreting the instructions be part of the process, not to mention that it be
"dynamic". I do think that Oracle's interpretation of
"instruction containing a symbolic reference" makes the PTO
re-examiner's finding of prior art well supported. So I am no fan of Oracle, nor
of this patent. I just don't agree that it is obvious that the patent could only
apply to some imaginary virtual machine instruction set in which machine
instructions contain literal strings that name their targets.
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