Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

And it may not end there. At the bottom of the page-long list in the lawsuit, Oracle dryly adds, “These examples of prior art are intended to be illustrative and not exhaustive, and Oracle reserves the right to assert other specific pieces of prior art.” That language parodies the standard boilerplate of patent filings.

This isn’t just a counterattack on Lodsys for going after Oracle’s retailer customers. It’s the nuclear option. It means that even if Lodsys somehow convinces Oracle to settle its lawsuit, anyone else Lodsys sues can use Oracle’s prior-art list as a starting point to attack Lodsys’ patents.

And, in effect, it puts Oracle in the position of defending every retailer that is using online support chat, online surveys or in-app purchasing from this particular line of patent attack, whether they’re Oracle customers or not.

Mostly, though, it’s probably just Oracle’s way of showing off. After just losing a bruising legal battle with Google over Android and just starting what’s likely to be an equally bruising trial with Hewlett-Packard over Itanium, maybe Larry Ellison just wanted his lawyers to pull out the big guns and blast away at somebody.

At least this time those guns were pointed away from everyone in retail IT.

And in case you thought we were kidding about that seemingly endless prior-art list in Oracle’s complaint:

U.S. Patent No. 4,245,245 (“Matsumoto”), U.S. Patent No. 4,546,382 (“McKenna”), U.S. Patent No. 4,345,315 (“Cadotte”), U.S. Patent No. 4,567,359 (“Lockwood”), U.S. Patent No. 4,689,619 (“O’Brien, Jr.”), U.S. Patent No. 4,740,890 (“William”), U.S. Patent No. 4,816,904 (“McKenna”), U.S. Patent No. 4,829,558 (“Welsh”), U.S. Patent No. 4,862,268 (“Campbell”), U.S. Patent No. 4,893,248 (“Pitts”), U.S. Patent No. 4,973,952 (“Malec”), U.S. Patent No. 4,912,552 (“Allison, III”), U.S. Patent No. 4,992,940 (“Dworkin”), U.S. Patent No. 5,001,554 (“Johnson”), U.S. Patent No. 5,003,384 (“Durden”), U.S. Patent No. 5,029,099 (“Goodman”), U.S. Patent No. 5,036,479 (“Prednis”), U.S. Patent No. 5,056,019 (“Schultz”), U.S. Patent No. 5,065,338 (“Phillips”), U.S. Patent No. 5,077,582 (“Kravette”), U.S. Patent No. 5,083,271 (“Thacher”), U.S. Patent No. 5,117,354 (“Long”), U.S. Patent No. 5,138,377 (“Smith”), U.S. Patent No. 5,207,784 (“Schwartzendruber”), U.S. Patent No. 5,237,157 (“Kaplan”), U.S. Patent No. 5,282,127 (“Mii”), U.S. Patent No. 5,283,734 (“Von Kohorn”), U.S. Patent No. 5,291,416 (“Hutchins”), U.S. Patent No. 5,335,048 (“Takano”), U.S. Patent No. 5,347,449 (“Meyer”), U.S. Patent No. 5,347,632 (“Filepp”), U.S. Patent No. 5,477,262 (“Banker”), U.S. Patent No. 5,496,175 (“Oyama”), U.S. Patent No. 5,740,035 (“Cohen”), U.S. Patent No. 5,956,505 (“Manduley”), Japanese Patent JP H2-65556 (“Kita”), Japanese Patent JP-03-064286-A (“Garza”), Japanese Patent JP H3-80662 (“Ukegawa”), Japanese Patent JP S60-200366 (“Tanaka”) and Japanese Patent JP S62-280771 (“Furukawa”).