I still believe that Google could have done a better job of communicating with developers and the community. But this is good news indeed.

> I'm not sure the courts take reexaminations seriously as a defense.

That generally depends in part on how far along the court case is when the reexamination request is filed.

On one hand, federal judges want to keep their cases moving; they themselves are judged by the peers (reputationally only; they have life tenure) in part by their average time to final disposition. If an accused infringer files a reexamination request in the USPTO just as its infringement case is about to go to trial, the chances are the judge might order the trial to proceed anyway.

On the other hand, a reexamination proceeding could make a case go away, or even just narrow the triable issues significantly. That would free up the judge and his or her law clerks to work on other cases.

And random factors can make a difference. I once had a judge fast-track a patent case about programmable thermostats. He did so because one of his law clerks that year had his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. The judge wanted to finish the case while that law clerk was still around to help him. The law clerk informed me and the other side of this at the first case management conference; he also noted for the record that my law firm had turned him down the previous year when he applied for a job with us; ouch .... (The case settled soon afterwards for unrelated reasons.)

There is a doctrine in patent law called the "doctrine of equivalents." [1] In short, it limits the ways you can use obvious work-arounds. In practice, it's very complex because there are often good reasons why they specified an "incrementing" counter rather than "any counter," but the idea is that you can't make a trivial change to get around the bulk of a patent.*

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents

* I am not your lawyer, get a lawyer, etc.

Semantics. Are you decrementing the counter by a positive number, or incrementing it by a negative number?

Any workaround would help going forward but there's still the issue of past infringement. Invalidating the patents fixes both those problems.

The actual court case will drag on forever I'm sure. But their ability to force a settlement seems pretty badly hurt. It's much easier for a corporate legal department to take a wait-and-see approach, waiting for a resolution here. The perceived risk is lower.

The important part being I could still have a patent on the steering even if the first 2 claims are denied.

It's very common in patents to only really have invented the last claim - all the previous claims are thrown out but the last one stands. It's partly an easy way of getting all your points across logically and partly a tactic of having some ground to give up in a legal battle

> I don't know if it's allowed for a claim to depend on more than one claim (i.e. have more than one parent; multiple inheritance)

Sort of, but probably not in the way you're thinking. You can write multiple dependent claims (although they are generally disfavored in the U.S. and cost extra in fees). But say you have something like this:

What is claimed is:

1. A chair comprising a seat and a plurality of legs.

2. The chair of claim 1, wherein said plurality of legs comprises four legs.

3. The chair of any preceding claim, wherein said seat is made of plastic.

So claim 3 is a multiple dependent claim, but the way it would be interpreted is basically as having the scope as if it were written as two separate claims: one depending from claim 1 (thus covering any chair with a plastic seat and some legs), and one depending from claim 2 (thus covering any chair with a plastic seat and four legs). So it's just a concise way of writing something that would logically expand into more than one claim, which isn't really the same thing as multiple inheritance in programming.