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In a legal filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco this morning, a copy of which was obtained from Oracle by RWW, attorneys for Oracle Corp. tell the judge in the ongoing infringement lawsuit against Google that it's willing to reopen negotiations for a settlement. Minutes ago, Google responded to that notice by telling the court it's willing to make executives available for settlement talks.

These events after documents filed yesterday in the case, and first uncovered by journalist Florian Mueller, reveal internal Google strategy briefings where it was suggested that Android should be developed on a course that appears to be open source, but actually is not. Instead, the documents from mid-2009 suggest, preferential treatment should be given specifically to Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless for being the first to develop Android phones to Google specifications.

According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate. Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.