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Oracle Patents The Almighty Buck The Courts Your Rights Online

Judge Nixes, Lowers Oracle's $1.3B Award Against SAP 48

itwbennett writes "Federal judge Phyllis Hamilton has overturned the $1.3 billion judgment Oracle won against SAP and has approved SAP's request that Oracle accept a lower award, which would negate the need for a new trial." Oracle is in the habit of asking for awards in the billions; with that model, they really can make it up on volume.
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Judge Nixes, Lowers Oracle's $1.3B Award Against SAP

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  • After all, it certainly isn't on selling products!

  • by oGMo ( 379 ) on Thursday September 01, 2011 @03:56PM (#37279812)

    Oracle is in the habit of asking for awards in the billions

    ...and they've clearly carried the practice over to lawsuits...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Riceballsan ( 816702 )
      I wonder if their outrageous claims give them legal viability.
      "We want 100 billion dollars from them"
      Judge: No
      OK 50 billion
      No
      5 billion then
      No
      2 billion
      That dosn't sound like much, OK.

      Defendent: But they haven't even proven we have done anything wrong
      Judge: Well they aren't asking much lets just give it to them so they stop bugging us.

  • by Ossifer ( 703813 ) on Thursday September 01, 2011 @04:12PM (#37279962)

    I should think Oracle would be happy to take that and have case closed. Somehow I doubt actual damages were that high...

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      I should think Oracle would be happy to take that and have case closed. Somehow I doubt actual damages were that high...

      I doubt they were even close. But ellison comes across as the kind of guy determined to have the biggest swinging dick at the country club, so it probably isn't about what's fair but instead how hard he can beat on the competition.
      ORACLE - One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

    • by schwit1 ( 797399 )

      Ellison's philosophy is that for Oracle to win everyone else must lose. There is no win-win to him. If he sees any opportunity to kill, he will.

  • When companies throw around billions of dollars on mere whims, that to me is proof that our financial model is obsolete. These corporations wield far too much power and influence and should be broken up.

    Does the fact that Oracle is a 40 billion dollar company result in better products ? No. Ask any Oracle admin.

    All it does it give them the power to bully everyone else around until there is nothing left. They gobbled up Sun. They chugged MySQL. They bought John Ashcroft (not that this was any challenge

    • They take and take, and they never give back.

      Shame on you, sir, for that vile calumny!

      They've given a lot of money to yacht builders, and a yacht to Larry.

      • by jd2112 ( 1535857 )

        They take and take, and they never give back.

        Shame on you, sir, for that vile calumny!

        They've given a lot of money to yacht builders, and a yacht to Larry.

        A yacht? Larry has a bigger fleet than some navies. Not to mention a fighter jet.

    • As much as I hate lobbying and monopolies Oracle is right on with 40 billion.

      Customers who own massive data warehouses use them. They are the only game in town. DB2 is the only thing that comes close and IBM consultants are not cheap either. SQL Server is not in the same league. No mysql is not a real database. Sure it now has foreign keys, transactions, nested statements, as a brand new cool thing, but Oracle has had all of that for 25 years. Oracle can do data mining and anaylsis of data using dimensions

      • True some stupid corporations love using Oracle Enterprise for a silly small 100 meg database over MySQL but that is up to them.

        Uses of Oracle of this form account for easily 95% of the Oracle licenses I've seen in my career.

        Say this for Oracle: They have amazing salesmen who can do the equivalent of sell an Formula One car and full pit crew to soccer moms who just want a car to get groceries with.

        • Well if you already use Oracle for your data wharehouse and your I.T. department is trained and has licences already then why not use it?

          • Because most companies, even ones that probably should have a robust data warehouse, don't.

            Oh, the stories I could tell you of Fortune 500 companies whose entire record of swaths of financial and historical information reside in Access 97 databases even though the company is using Oracle for other things. Well, the stories I could tell you, NDAs notwithstanding.

  • Imaginary Customers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Swanktastic ( 109747 ) on Thursday September 01, 2011 @04:33PM (#37280212)

    "Rather than providing evidence of SAP's actual use of the copyrighted works, and objectively verifiable number of customers lost as a result, Oracle presented evidence of the purported value of the intellectual property as a whole, elicited self-serving testimony from its executives regarding the price they claim they would have demanded in an admittedly fictional negotiation, and proffered the speculative opinion of its damages expert, which was based on little more than guesses about the parties' expectations."

    This comment from the judge is fascinating considering every software company out there pegs their piracy losses at face value rather than pointing to evidence of lost sales.

    • Be easy on them. After all, you can trust them to come up with the right amount of money that they potentially lost (they can see into alternate realities).

  • by Nethemas the Great ( 909900 ) on Thursday September 01, 2011 @04:35PM (#37280228)
    These lawsuits look good to the shareholders. They short circuit their critical thinking skills in very much the same way gambling does. Indeed these lawsuits are just that, corporate gambling with potentially massive payouts.
  • SAP. It's much cheaper to hire an assassin than to pay 1.3 billion to an extortionist (and it's never the right policy to pay the Dane-Geld). I think extortion is never right and above certain level any response becomes justified. People dealt with extortionists very harshly when they could over the history of human race. I don't see many people crying over Oracle's CEO should something nasty happen to him.

    • by Ossifer ( 703813 )

      FTFA: "SAP had admitted liability for illegal downloads of Oracle software and support materials..."

      You might also want note to SAP not to do that again...

    • What people forget too is that Oracle purchased PeopleSoft who is Sap's biggest competitor. I think this has less to do with Java more than it does hurting your competitors and making them bleed.

      Larry has been known to get pretty obsessive in its war over Microsoft a decade ago. Remember the story of Oracle hiring detectives to sort through garbage at Microsoft anti trust trail in order to file a friend of the court with the bundling of IE? Larry lobbied large amounts of money to make sure Microsoft was spl

      • and of course Oracle blames former SAP CEO, who is now head of HP. So this thing is part of the HP vs. Oracle fight. Fry up the popcorn, it's gonna be a hoot.

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