Oracle Launched Lawsuit Against Google

The industry observers seem to get used to the idea that if Oracle launches a lawsuit, it always asks for a silly amount of money, because the recent Java case didn’t surprised them at all.

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Indeed, this case appeared to be no exception: according to court papers, Oracle has literally made up the figures, divided by its shoe size and invented some more calculations to claim that Google owes the company $1.16 billion of damages.

Local media reported that Oracle keeps insisting on the case, saying that it suffered after Google integrated some of its key Java technology in its Android operating system. Actually, the announced figure is much lower than what Google said Larry Ellison was after. The search giant believes that Oracle is demanding $2.2 billion, and it is still much lower than what the company initially wanted (approximately $6.1 billion). Still, it is unclear what a few billion mean in the case between such companies, and the U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed to this point, refusing the $6.1 billion and calling the figure simply unrealistic. However, the judge gave Oracle the chance to revise the claim.

In the interview, Oracle lawyer Steven Holtzman explained that the revised damages estimate resulted from $202 million for patent violation, coupled with $960 million for copyright violation. However, he didn’t say why on earth Oracle told its attorneys to go for this money at the first place. It doesn’t seem that Google is a small company that may be intimidated by such lawsuit. They also couldn’t count on the possibility that a judge would buy the idea that Oracle has suffered that much even if a bit of Java really end up in Android.

As for the search giant, it promised to show evidence that in fact Sun supported the use of Java code in Android before Oracle targeted the outfit. 

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