Google wants penalty phase dropped in Oracle's lawsuit

Google is expected to file a motion to have the third phase of the patent action the company is currently fighting, dropped from the case.

If you’ve recently returned from some interplanetary travel or have just awoken from a two year slumber, you may not be aware that Oracle, owner of Java, has sued Google over its use of certain Java code in the Android operating system.

The first phase of the trial has been completed with the jury finding that Google did indeed infringe by using 37 APIs that Oracle claims copyright on. Unfortunately for Oracle however, the jury was unable to agree that the APIs in question were in fact copyrightable at all. This has left Google without liability for damages in respect to those APIs.

However, infringement was found in Android’s use of 9 lines of range check code that they claim to have accidentally incorporated in earlier versions of the OS. So in theory, Oracle could be due $150,000, the maximum allowable in the event of accidental infringement, but the Judge has stated that he’s unwilling to waste valuable jury time attempting to have them arrive at a finding and will likely make the determination himself.

Assuming Oracle is awarded the $150,000, it will be rather a non-victory considering the extensive costs involved in the litigation thus far, and is light years short of the six billion dollars the company was suing for at the beginning of the litigation. And there’s every possibility that even that paltry sum will be off the table as Google is expected to move that the third phase of the trial, the penalty phase, be dropped altogether. In which case, Oracle will have spent serious coin for nothing.

But all is not lost for Larry Ellison’s favourite software company. The patent phase is being argued at present and may conceivably result in Android being found guilty of infringement, with some monetary punitive award being made against it. Unhappily for Oracle, the smart money is on all remaining patent infringement claims failing and Google walking away from the action with no penalty at all.

An interesting aside – Oracle CEO Larry Ellison was a very good friend of the late Steve Jobs, the very man who vowed to go “thermonuclear” in Apple’s war against Android, a war that is still being fought in courtrooms around the world with Android-using OEMs as the enemy. I don’t think Steve would be very pleased with his best buddy’s lackluster efforts against the archenemy, Google.

Source: The Verge and others