Oracle Told To Pay Google Over $1m In Legal Costs

Having sought damages in the region of $6 billion (£3.8 billion) from Google and received nothing, Oracle has now been told to pay its rival $1.13 million in legal costs.

Oracle lost its fight against Google, in which it accused the Mountain View giant of copyright violations and patent infringement in creating the Android mobile operating system. In particular, Oracle claimed Google used pieces of Java-related code in Android illegally.

Earlier in the year, a jury decided Google was not guilty of infringing on two Oracle patents. After a US Judge ruled in favour of Google and said Java APIs were not copyright protected, Oracle was told in June it was to receive nothing from the courts. Now Larry Ellison’s company will have to pay Google money.

Kick ’em when they’re down…

Google sought $4 million in costs from Oracle, but its request was only granted in part by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. It was denied a request to be reimbursed for work carried out by e-discovery firm FTI Consulting

Oracle claimed it should not have to pay legal costs as it had brought up an issue of national importance, but the judge disagreed.

“Oracle did not bring its API copyright claim for the benefit of addressing ‘a landmark issue of national importance,’ but instead fell back on an overreaching (albeit somewhat novel) theory of copyright infringement for its own financial interests late in litigation. On these facts, Oracle has failed to overcome the presumption of awarding costs to Google,” read the court document, posted online by Groklaw.

“The problem with Google’s e-discovery bill of costs is that many of item-line descriptions seemingly bill for ‘intellectual effort’ such as organising, searching and analysing the discovery documents.”

Oracle will now be preparing for another legal battle with Google, as it gets ready for an appeal against the original decision not to award it any damages.

At the time of publication, Oracle had not responded to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, SAP claimed Oracle was also appealing against a decision involving those two firms. Oracle was handed less than it wanted, after alleging SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow illegally downloaded millions of Oracle files, including customer-support software and hundreds of thousands of pages of supporting documentation from one of its websites.

Having initially been granted $1.3 billion in damages, Oracle was told it would only get $272 million.

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