There’s one key lesson you can learn from the clash of Oracle and Google in the courtroom over whether Google’s Java use in Android OS has infringed upon Oracle’s intellectual property rights…
The Internet continues to expose current patent, trademark, and copyright law as obsolete because the legal system is ill-equipped to identify and protect your intellectual property in the 21st Century.
It isn’t a matter of copyright infringement, patent infringement, or trademark infringement. The issue is that intellectual property law cannot keep up, which begs the question of whether it should in the first place.
This isn’t some anti-capitalist rant demanding intellectual property be in the public domain or distributed via a copyleft license. Instead, it is a reflection that current IP laws create trolls (Righthaven) who litigate and dinosaurs who abuse the system (RIAA and MPAA) rather than truly serving the rights of intellectual property owners while promoting entrepreneurial creativity.
So who wins in the Google Oracle Java Android dispute? Absolutely no one except the litigators who profit from it. And that’s a shame.
