Oracle Not Satisfied With Potential $150,000; Goes Against Judge's Warning

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.

I, for one, am shocked

[reiserifick]

that lawyers would ignore the advice of the judge and pursue ridiculous sums of money with no basis.

Those racing yachts cost money

[spirit_fingers]

You have to feel sorry for Larry. He was hoping the Google settlement would pay his America's Cup expenses. $150k will barely cover In-N-Out burgers for the deck hands.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!

Someone should look into US court system.

This comment is so bloated with troll and stupid ... I believe my brain bled by reading it.

Re:U.S. court systems

[thegarbz]

You're soft. Back when I was teaching CS courses we punished students for copying even 1 line of code.

Not a lot of people passed. Had something to do with "int main() {". Hmmm I wonder if that line has been copyrighted...

- Larry P.

Re:U.S. court systems

[uncqual]

Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[demonbug]

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

        if (fromIndex > toIndex)

                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +

                                      ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

        if (fromIndex arrayLen)

                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

Hopefully Oracle won't sue me for this...

Oh great, now you owe Oracle 6 billion karma. Nothing but Larry Ellison PR bits on Slashdot from here on out.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[jd]

Old, wizened lawyer #1: "If we agree to Oracle's naive, stupid and utterly doomed plan, we will make ourselves look extremely stupid to the geeks."

Old, wizened lawyer #2: "The geeks can't afford us anyway, so who cares what they think? We'll make gob-loads of money off Oracle. Imagine what we can buy with that?"

Middle-aged, blue, slightly-fuzzy lawyer that looks remarkably like a sock puppet: "Coooooookies!!!!! Mrumrumrumrumrumrumrum"

Re:U.S. court systems

[Barbara, not Barbie]

pretty much any c program can be written in under 9 lines of code. Of course, some of those lines will be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long ...