Oracle To Pay Google $1 Million For Lawyer Fees In Failed Patent Case 97
eldavojohn writes "You may recall the news that Google would not be paying Oracle for Oracle's intellectual property claims against the search giant. Instead, Google requested $4.03 million for lawyer fees in the case. The judge denied some $2.9 million of those fees and instead settled on $1.13 million as an appropriate number for legal costs. Although this is relative peanuts to the two giants, Groklaw breaks the ruling down into more minute detail for anyone curious on what risks and repercussions are involved with patent trolling."
Re:Larry, who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Ellison, not Page
Ellison is CEO of Oracle
Re:Uncanny How FloMu Was Right! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, its amazing just how many bloggers are running away from their predictions:
It's all but said and done that Oracle is going to have some kind of pay day. During a court hearing last July, Judge Alsup admitted that Google is definitely going to pay up "probably in the millions, maybe in the billions" at some point.
Rachel King [zdnet.com] April 16, 2012.
SF Gate [sfgate.com], on the other hand pretty much predicted this outcome just 9 days later on April 25, 2012:
The remarkable thing is that, when the dust settles, five of the seven patents Oracle claimed that Google violated will likely be overturned because Google forced the patent office to take a second look. ...
If only two of Oracle's patents hold up on review, that means the patent office got it right less than 30 percent of the time, an average we have every reason to believe is representative of the entire sector's patents. In fact, software patent holders lose nearly 90 percent of the time in litigation, Stanford law Professor Mark Lemley found in a research paper published last year.
The courts would do best if they just struck down software patents again [forbes.com], as they have done three times in the past.
Even the output from software should not be patentable (slide to unlock).
Re:Patents (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, no.
The process from beginning to nearly the end was about patents. Google ended up getting virtually all of them invalidated, and Oracle tried to fall back on copyright.
Go read Groklaw [groklaw.net]:
Oracle initially alleged infringement of seven patents and 132 claims but each claim ultimately was either dismissed with prejudice or found to be non-infringed by the jury. ... Oracle’s first damages report barely mentioned copyright claims), ... but instead fell back on an overreaching (albeit somewhat novel) theory of copyright infringement for its own financial interests late in litigation.
Re:Pocket change (Score:4, Informative)
Or else Larry can postpone his next yacht purchase [wikipedia.org] for a few weeks.
There's a lot of free DBMS software out there, but Oracle's isn't a clone of it, any more than Windows is a clone of Linux. Oracle has a gigantic ecosystem of users who depend on the fact that there's a big pool of Oracle-trained developers out there. And of course a lot of users are locked in by having Oracle-based infrastructure that's taken them decades to develop. None of these are in a position to move to PostgreSQL, never mind MySQL.
Re:Ediscovery! (Score:5, Informative)
Google asked for $4 million. Of that, $3 million was for electronic discovery [wikipedia.org], which the judge disallowed. Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.
Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.
Actually Groklaw does explain why the e-discovery costs were denied:
However, “fees for exemplification and copying are permitted only for the physical preparation and duplication of documents, not the intellectual effort involved in their production.” ...
The problem with Google’s e-discovery bill of costs is that many of item-line descriptions seemingly bill for “intellectual effort” such as organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents.
They made a billing error. They tried to bill consultant "think" time as document prep time.
Had they done this work with lawyers they may have been able to bill it, but on the other hand by doing it with researchers and analysts the actually prevailed where it is less likely lawyers alone would have done so, not being specialists in this particular type of research. I suspect Google will take that outcome any day.
Re:Haha Larry (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. I was working for Sun during most of the acquisition process, and I get so tired of hearing that the acquisition was about Java. Sun cost Oracle $5.6 billion. No way is a not very profitable piece of software worth that much.
The one thing everybody knows about Sun is that they invented Java, so everybody takes it for granted that Java was an important profit center for Sun. It most assuredly was not. Most of Sun's income came from selling hardware. Oracle was promising to make billions moving Sun hardware through Oracle sales channels. This was plausible not only because Oracle's sales organization was huge (at the time, it employed more people than all of Sun), but because anybody who buys Oracle software also has to buy a computer to run it on.
(I was so looking forward to working for Oracle; Sun middle management was a nasty combination of old hands who still thought that SPARC had a future and mindless bureaucrats who made bad decisions because it kept the paperwork tidy. Alas, the mindless bureaucrats decided I was a nuisance. Shouldn't have tried so hard to do good work for them.)
This acquisition didn't work out, but that had nothing to do with Java. The problem is that the name-brand hardware is a dying business. HP is in trouble. Dell is in trouble. IBM isn't in trouble, but only because they've deemphasized hardware in favor of service. It's hard to tell if Lenovo is in trouble, because they're basically owned by the Chinese government, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Name brand hardware can't compete with cheap generic hardware. Its only selling point is that it's more powerful and reliable than generic hardware. But if you're running a cloud-oriented data center, you don't care about power or reliability. You buy more systems to make up for the decreased power, and you set up the cloud so that unreliable systems don't impact overall reliability.
Oracle's mistake was to try to become IBM at a time when IBM was following the more sensible course of becoming Oracle.
Re:pocket change (Score:4, Informative)
Apple Revenue: 108b. Samsung: 247b
Apple Assets: 116b. Samsung: 348b
Apple Equity: 76b. Samsung: 224b
Apple Employees: 60k. Samsung: 344k