Oracle To Receive Just $150,000 In Java Patent Lawsuit

A landmark copyright court case in which Oracle claimed $1 billion (£630m) from Google in compensation for Android’s Java technology might end in disappointment for the company.

The jury handed Oracle a partial victory earlier this week. However, federal judge William Alsup, presiding over the case, has told Oracle that the maximum amount of statutory damages it would be able to claim from the copyright infringements was $150,000.

Not much of an Oracle

Oracle had claimed that Android developers violated copyrights to the Java software platform, infringed two Java-related patents and illegally used design specifications of at least 37 application programming interface packages (APIs).

Oracle filed this complaint in 2010, basing its claim on patents for the technology, widely used in smartphones, which it acquired with the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2009.

During the case, several e-mails that were exchanged between Google employees surfaced, seemingly pointing at the fact that the management at Mountain View was fully aware that they needed a license to use Java.

For example, Timothy Lindholm, a former Sun Microsystems employee who began work at Google in 2005, wrote an email to the Android project manager Andy Rubin to discuss alternatives to using Sun’s Java in Android development, saying, “We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.”

After long deliberations, the jury handed Oracle a partial win on 7 May finding that Google did indeed violate the company’s copyrights related to the Java programming language, and effectively stole some APIs for use in the Android operating system.

However, Alsup warned Oracle at the US District Court of Northern California yesterday that the “most” the plaintiff might end up with is statutory damages over the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method, reports ZDNet.

“The fact that they have nine lines out of many millions, you have no damage study tied in,” Alsup explained to Oracle.

And yet, according to the H Online, if Google is found to have infringed wilfully, Oracle would be eligible for up to three times the amount of damages. The total sum would then be $450,000, still peanuts when compared to the $1 billion that Oracle was asking for.

Google has filed a motion for the copyrights phase of the trial to be declared a mistrial.

The API copyright issue will be ruled on by the judge at the conclusion of the trial since it is a question of law and can not be opined on by the jury.

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