What I take away from this is that a serious court case costs millions of dollars. Which means is that the current patent system erects a massive moat around the entrenched players with large patent portfolios and the cash to put lawyers to work 24/7/365.<p>From time to time, some small troll wins a few hundred million from Microsoft or whatever, but the real story here is that if you don't have ten million dollars to buy into the game, you can't play. It's almost as if the odd "win" by a bit player is a PR stunt to convince congress that the current system is an incentive for entrepreneurs and dreamers to invent new things.<p>But it's all bullshit. It's a rigged game.
I guess we'll never know for sure if Steve Jobs egged on his buddy Larry Ellison to throw this sucker punch at Android but given his apoplectic reaction to Android it sure seems likely.
Also, I'd like to try and point this out again:
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/103158031/Google-Shill-List" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/103158031/Google-Shill-List</a><p>I don't think an article mentioning the google bloggers ever reached >10 points, at least by my googling.
Just to put this in perspective, Oracle has just over $30B in liquidity.<p>$1M / $30B = 0.0000333<p>That's the equivalent of having $300 in your pocket and someone demanding 1 penny.
<i>Google had asked for $4,030,669, but the judge cut it back, denying the part that was for the work done by the ediscovery vendor. Truthfully, I've never seen a bill of costs that was not cut back, but the bottom line is, Oracle has to pay for bringing this stupid lawsuit about APIs.</i>