Without getting into detail (or touching on the related copyright issues), I would sum this up as follows concerning the software patents at issue in this case:

Without getting into detail (or touching on the related copyright issues), I would sum this up as follows concerning the software patents at issue in this case: Google is taking its cue, of all things, from the Supreme Court's Bilski decision, which upheld business method and software patents in general but which also gave lower courts a powerful tool with which to smash them if it liked - and that is to invalidate them as unpatentable "abstract ideas" if they did not satisfy the so-called machine-or-transformation test and if there were no other basis by which to remove them from the abstract-idea category. Many here were deeply disappointed in the Bilski outcome but, take heart, that battle is not over yet. Even while rejecting the machine-or-transformation test as an exclusive test for saying that a particular business method meets the test for patentable subject matter, the Supreme Court nonetheless upheld that test as a useful indicator of whether something was patentable or not. If, for example, a software patent failed to meet that test, then a court could potentially conclude that it did not constitute patentable subject matter. What then? In all likelihood, a court would say, as did the Supreme Court in Bilski, that the challenged patent fails as constituting only an abstract idea, which is not patentable. Courts have more and more been using the Bilski precedent as authority to strike down software and business method patents on abstract-idea grounds. Bilski pointed the way and many courts are following. (See, e.g., http://ipspotlight.com/2010/08/19/district-court-rules-internet-advertising-patent-invalid-under-bilski/ http://ipspotlight.com/2010/08/19/district-court-rules-inter...) The Groklaw piece referred to in this article discusses this in more detail (see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101111114933605 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20101111114933605). Moreover, in an August 13, 2010 piece (http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100813112425821 http://groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100813112425821), Groklaw reported that "Groklaw member Celtic_hackr went through [the Oracle software patents] and sees none that are tied to any specific machine." With its latest filing, Google is revealing its strategy as one of taking on Oracle's software patents head on and asking the court to declare them invalid on the abstract-idea ground (among others). This is very aggressive and has potentially huge consequences. Bottom line: Oracle can go fishing for opportunistic dollars but it will do so against Google only at a potentially devastating cost to its newly-acquired Sun assets. In the precatory words of Groklaw (in the item last cited above): "And may software patents crash into the ocean as an unintended consequence of this patent attack."