Oracle patent claims versus Google sent to jury

[Son of Govinda]

Oracle patent claims versus Google sent to jury | Reuters

(Reuters) - A California jury began another round of deliberations on Tuesday in a high profile trial over allegations that Google's Android mobile platform violates Oracle's intellectual property rights.

The jury has already wrestled with Oracle's copyright claims against Google and delivered a partial verdict last week. Now, jurors are mulling Oracle's patent claims, but the potential patent damages appear far less than what is involved in the copyright allegations.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010, saying Android infringes on its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language. Google says it does not violate Oracle's patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, an "open-source," or publicly available, software language.

The trial in San Francisco federal court has been divided into three phases: copyright liability, patent claims, and damages.

In court on Tuesday, attorneys for both companies made their closing arguments on patents. Oracle attorney Michael Jacobs said it does not matter that Oracle's patents only cover certain small parts of Android.

"You don't avoid infringement because Android is big," Jacobs said, adding that Google's conduct was reckless.

Google attorney Robert Van Nest said the company designed Android from scratch, and that there is no evidence Google encountered the patented technology until Oracle threatened litigation.

"There's not a single document, not an email," Van Nest said.

While Oracle is seeking roughly $1 billion in copyright damages, the patent damages in play are much lower. Before trial, Google offered to pay Oracle roughly $2.8 million in damages on the two patents remaining in the case, covering the period through 2011, according to a filing made jointly by the companies.

For future damages, Google proposed paying Oracle 0.5 percent of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015 percent on a second patent until it expires in April 2018. Oracle rejected the settlement offer.

During trial, U.S. District Judge William Alsup revealed that Android generated roughly $97.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2010.

The jury found last week that Oracle had proven copyright infringement for parts of Java. But the jury could not unanimously agree on whether Google could fairly use that material.

Without a finding against Google on that fair use question, Oracle cannot recover damages on the bulk of its copyright claims. Alsup has not yet decided on several legal questions that could determine how a potential retrial would unfold.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.

 

[LETHALFORCE]

I wonder what will happen to all the android phones if Google loses?

 

[H.A.]

I wonder what will happen to all the android phones if Google loses?

if something like that happens then good for me....sala Windows ke toh waat lag gaye hai...(Windows has been kicked aside) after the introduction of Android....

 

[nrj]

Android is the future !

Legal cases end up in monetary compensations.

 

[LurkerBaba]

One of the judges in the case is a programmer

One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome?

So far all that Oracle has managed to prove is that Google copied nine lines of Java code, that are incorporated into Android operating system and eight test files that are not part of the production code. And yesterday, in a hearing about "infringer profits" Judge Alsup challenged Oracle's lawyer David Boies for trying to pin so much on the rangeCheck infringement.

Boies had been trying to claim that Google's use of rangeCheck was "no accident" and that they had used it in order to save time:

They wanted it faster, faster, faster. This copying allowed them to use fewer resources and accelerate that. Suppose they accelerated it two days. They're making $3 million a day now, activating 700k or 800k phones. [something about how Google estimates they make $8 to $10 per activation] If you just get one or two days' acceleration, that's $6 million or $7 million, and it's not something that's untethered from the value that's created.

Judge Alsup then reminded Boies that, in order to claim infringer damages, Oracle will have to prove a "causal nexus", i.e a connection, between the infringement and the body of profits being sought. To this Boies replied:

I still think it's possible to demonstrate a nexus by showing that speed was very important to Google in getting Android out, and by copying they accelerated that.

It was at this point that the Judge made the revelation that caused a flurry of excitement:

I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

Boies obviously misunderstands and responds:

I want to come back to rangeCheck.

To which Judge Alsup deliver's a body blow which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch:

Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--

And the lawyer reveals he doesn't:

I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.

Oracle v Google Judge Is A Programmer!

 

[nrj]

I think he is the one who said any 16yr old kid can write that piece of code which Oracle is bragging about