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The long-standing legal row between the two will finally reach court in
spring, with Oracle having had to withdraw most of its patent claims,
but copyright claims still there
So, finally, it's on. US District judge William Alsup has scheduled a trial between Oracle and Google Inc for 16 April and expects it to last about eight weeks. At issue: claims that Google violated Oracle's intellectual property rights relating to the Java programming language.
The trial is set to take place in a San Francisco federal court. It has been a long road to get to trial: Oracle first sued Google in 2010, alleging that the Android mobile operating technology infringes Oracle's Java patents. But almost all of the patents that Oracle first asserted against Google have either been withdrawn or knocked down following re-examination by the US Patent Office at the behest of Google, and Alsup pressed Oracle in the past few weeks either to abandon the patents element altogether or to focus on just one.
Oracle, in response, has been trying to get the trial to go ahead without the patent element, but leaving the way open to have a fresh trial over the patents in future - a suggestion Alsup has resisted strongly. But Alsup seems to have relented: in the trial order there are now two patents remaining in the lawsuit, out of five that Oracle initially asserted.
But the patent elements aren't the only ones at issue. Oracle has also brought copyright infringement claims against Google, and those are expected to be the key part of the upcoming trial.
Oracle acquired the Java programming language through its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. It is claiming substantial damages - though the amount is subject to argument. But if successful over both the patent element and the the copyright claims, Oracle's damages could still run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but probably not the billions that it was once demanding from Google.
However Florian Müller, an independent patents blogger, says that Oracle's objective is not simply financial; instead, he says, "its priority is to win an injunction against Android in order to 'bring Android back into the Java fold'… if Oracle wins an injunction based on copyrighted API-related material, it's possible that Google will indeed have to accede to Oracle's demand to adhere to the official Java standard (or that Google will have to pay a much higher price in order for Oracle to condone continued fragmentation of Java)."
According to the Groklaw blog, which has copies of the trial briefs of the copyright element of the case, Oracle contends that Google has copied and "created derivative works" of 37 Java API design specifications, along with the implementations of those specifications - where Oracle says Google may have originated the source code, but that that code is a "derivative work" of the specifications, and that copying 11 Java software code files. On the specifications, Oracle contends that Google copied them almost verbatim in creating the corresponding Android API specifications.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.
Oracle will get its
day - actually up to eight weeks - in court against Google over Android.
Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
So, finally, it's on. US District judge William Alsup has scheduled a trial between Oracle and Google Inc for 16 April and expects it to last about eight weeks. At issue: claims that Google violated Oracle's intellectual property rights relating to the Java programming language.
The trial is set to take place in a San Francisco federal court. It has been a long road to get to trial: Oracle first sued Google in 2010, alleging that the Android mobile operating technology infringes Oracle's Java patents. But almost all of the patents that Oracle first asserted against Google have either been withdrawn or knocked down following re-examination by the US Patent Office at the behest of Google, and Alsup pressed Oracle in the past few weeks either to abandon the patents element altogether or to focus on just one.
Oracle, in response, has been trying to get the trial to go ahead without the patent element, but leaving the way open to have a fresh trial over the patents in future - a suggestion Alsup has resisted strongly. But Alsup seems to have relented: in the trial order there are now two patents remaining in the lawsuit, out of five that Oracle initially asserted.
But the patent elements aren't the only ones at issue. Oracle has also brought copyright infringement claims against Google, and those are expected to be the key part of the upcoming trial.
Oracle acquired the Java programming language through its purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. It is claiming substantial damages - though the amount is subject to argument. But if successful over both the patent element and the the copyright claims, Oracle's damages could still run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but probably not the billions that it was once demanding from Google.
However Florian Müller, an independent patents blogger, says that Oracle's objective is not simply financial; instead, he says, "its priority is to win an injunction against Android in order to 'bring Android back into the Java fold'… if Oracle wins an injunction based on copyrighted API-related material, it's possible that Google will indeed have to accede to Oracle's demand to adhere to the official Java standard (or that Google will have to pay a much higher price in order for Oracle to condone continued fragmentation of Java)."
According to the Groklaw blog, which has copies of the trial briefs of the copyright element of the case, Oracle contends that Google has copied and "created derivative works" of 37 Java API design specifications, along with the implementations of those specifications - where Oracle says Google may have originated the source code, but that that code is a "derivative work" of the specifications, and that copying 11 Java software code files. On the specifications, Oracle contends that Google copied them almost verbatim in creating the corresponding Android API specifications.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.
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