Oracle Not Satisfied With Potential $150,000; Goes Against Judge's Warning 234
bobwrit writes with news about how the monetary damages in the Google v. Oracle case might shake out. On Thursday, Judge Alsup told Oracle the most it could expect for statutory damages was a flat $150,000, a far cry from the $6.1 billion Oracle wanted in 2011, or even the $2.8 million offered by Google as a settlement. However, Oracle still thinks it can go after infringed profits, even though Judge Alsup specifically warned its lawyers they were making a mistake. He said, "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions." Groklaw has a detailed post about today's events.
Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:U.S. court systems (Score:4, Interesting)
The engineer has admitted he "probably" copy-pasted the code over.
(Google wasn't exactly running a 'clean room', and Android engineers were also contributing to Sun Java.)
Re:U.S. court systems (Score:5, Interesting)
The engineer made was rewriting the sort function for dalvik and contributed it back to java. He was the original author of the java sort function, and reused the java sort range check function since he believed it would all be reintegrated back into the the original java sort.
Re:U.S. court systems (Score:2, Interesting)
Watching this is fun. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Plagiarizing Yourself? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lots of works vs. one work (Score:2, Interesting)
Ahh, but there's 17 USC 504(b) to consider (emphasis mine)
Taken at face value, this means if Google infringed even a single line of code (let alone 9), Oracle is entitled to ALL of Google's gross revenue unless Google proves that each dollar was either
1) Used for expenses or
2) Attributable to some factor other than the infringed work
And you probably thought statutory damages were the most unjust part of copyright law.... turns out actual damages are even worse.
Unfortunately for Oracle, Google probably has armies of lawyers and accountants who can do the proving. Probably it will cost Google more than $150,000 just to do so.
Re:U.S. court systems (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle is out exactly nothing because of Google's infringement. Google's benefit from using that code instead of rolling their own -- and they clearly intended to roll their own -- was less than an hour of a competent programmers time. So the benefit to Google was at most $200.
Copyright law is not intended to protect a few lines of code. It's intended to protect the ownership and merchantability of a significant body of work.
Let's hope they award Oracle what they ACTUALLY LOST by Google's mistake.
Re:U.S. court systems (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.