Oracle: Google ‘Knew It Was Doing The Wrong Thing’

Oracle attorney Michael Jacobs came out swinging hard at Google on 16 April in his opening argument as the company began its $1 billion (£630m) copyright-infringement lawsuit against the web services giant in federal district court in San Francisco.

Jacobs, a partner in the law firm Morrison & Foerster, attempted to convince a 12-person jury and presiding Judge William Alsup that Google IT managers were quite aware that they used proprietary Java application programming interfaces owned by Oracle to create the Android mobile-device operating system – one that now runs more than 300 million smartphones and tablet PCs.

‘Doing the wrong thing’

In an opening statement that went for about 60 minutes, Jacobs said that Oracle “will prove to you from beginning to end… that Google knew it was doing the wrong thing.

“This case is about Google’s use, in Google’s business, of somebody else’s property without permission,” Jacobs said. “You can’t just step on someone’s IP because you think you have a good business reason for it.”

Oracle first filed suit in August 2010, claiming that Google illegally used seven Java application programming interfaces that Oracle owns to help build the Android operating system. Google contends that the APIs it uses cannot be copyrighted because doing so would be similar to copyrighting a technique used to perform a task. Legally, techniques are not considered intellectual property.

Jacobs showed the jury a group of Google emails from 2005 to help state his case. In that year, several months before Sun released Java to the open source community in November 2006, Google Android team manager Andy Rubin sent an email to Google co-founder Larry Page proposing to buy a licence for Java and its APIs.

“We’ll have to pay Sun for the licence,” Rubin said in the email.

‘Sun won’t be happy’

But an email two years later from Rubin to then-chief executive Eric Schmidt shows that Google “consciously decided against taking a licence”, Jacobs said.

“I’m done with Sun (tail between my legs, you were right),” Rubin wrote to Schmidt. “They (Sun) won’t be happy when we release our stuff.”

At one point, Judge Alsup warned both legal teams that they will need “to show good cause for any evidence submitted at trial to be kept from the public”, and that unsavoury details about either company might go into the public record.

“Unless it’s the recipe for Coca-Cola, it’s going to be public,” Alsup said. “If it reveals something embarrassing about the way one of these companies works, too bad. That’s going to be out there for the public to see.”

Next steps

Google’s lawyers from the San Francisco firm of Keker & Van Nest will present their opening statements on 17 April.

Selection of the 12-person jury began early on 16 April at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and US Courthouse in downtown San Francisco. The court clerk said the trial could go as long as 10 weeks.

Oracle is asking the US District Court in Northern California for $1 billion in damages and an injunction against Google from using its IP in Android.

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