I believe this makes a patent settlement between Apple and Nokia in the form of a cross-license easier and more likely to happen in the near term. That's the biggest IT patent war I've ever seen. Apple asserted a variety of smartphone-related patents such as touchscreen user interface patents against Nokia in response to Nokia enforcing some standards-related (GSM, UMTS etc.) patents. Now that Nokia has chosen Windows Phone for the high end, I can't imagine that Apple would enforce patents against a Microsoft operating system. Those two companies haven't had a patent fight in a long time. It would make strategic sense for Apple and Nokia to settle and to focus on competitors building Android-based devices. I commented on this in more detail on my blog.

Happy to clarify. I was talking about misuse of mod points. The purpose of mod points is to rate posts by their content (as opposed to holding an overall popularity vote on the author). Rating a reasonable contribution to a discussion as a "troll" post constitutes misuse because it means an unjustified rating, with the effect that readers are less likely to get access to useful information. It's anti-social behavior because it adversely affects the quality of the information people are likely to see here.

It's not a "creative interpretation" to refer to android.git.kernel.org as Android. I will clarify this, with some additional information that may surprise some, on my blog soon.

I believe people who try to just misuse mod points against me are real trolls and Slashdot should make sure that such people don't get mod points again too soon.

You can be sure the damage award would not be zero even if nobody ever used it. Just the act of publishing it creates damage. And can you or anyone else prove that no one ever downloaded the file, relied on an Apache license header and consequently built it into something (Android or not)?

I'll do a couple of follow-up posts on my blog these days to respond to some of the misconceptions and misinformation out there.

My blog never made a specific claim about Android devices containing certain code. From a copyright law point of view, however, putting software online for everyone to download means "to distribute", or "to ship", such code, and distributing, or shipping, infringing code makes someone liable.

Ed Burnette, whose post is referenced here, does not seem to understand even basic copyright-related terminology and concepts. He's wrong on almost everything he wrote and I'll debunk itI already left some comments below his article.

It's also wrong, as stated above, that Google "deleted" those files. They are still in the Froyo (Android 2.2) and Gingerbread (2.3) trees. At least they were when I last checked, which was yesterday. They are just not in the tree for future versions.

There is so much out there that's wrong, and I'll deal with it step by step.