Google Wants Billion-Dollar Figures in Oracle Copyright Suit Kept Under Wraps

The legal saga continues between Oracle and Google (News - Alert) over alleged copyright infringement by Google resulting from it use of JavaScript in its Android product.

Oracle, which acquired Java in January 2010 when it acquired Sun Microsystems (News - Alert), has been in a legal fight with Google since August of that year when it tried through an injunction to keep Google from using anything related to Java in its products, and to destroy anything it did make that relies on anything related Java. Google’s Android (News - Alert) product uses software (Dalvik) that is related to Java programming language.

Finally, late last week, San Francisco Superior Court U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s online docket revealed that in a letter from Google dated June 6, “Oracle’s (News - Alert) expert estimated Google would owe Oracle between $1.4 billion and $6.1 billion in damages if it was found liable for infringement,” Karen Gullo reported in Bloomberg (News - Alert) on Friday. Apparently unhappy that figures of that magnitude were going to be made public, Google filed a motion to have the case filed “under seal,” according to Rob Young on Search Engine Watch today.  

Young reasoned that the move on Google’s part was taken in an effort to keep certain information confidential as well as to ensure that shareholder confidence doesn’t plummet. Google’s lawyers are claiming Oracle’s damages estimates are “out of proportion to any meaningful measure of the intellectual property at issue.”  

Oracle fired back stating that the damage amount "should not be hidden from the public view," and the damages claim “are based on both accepted methodology and a wealth of concrete evidence,"  Businessweek reported.

Google has maintained all along that the Oracle suit is without merit because it says Android is, in Gullo’s words, “a smartphone operating system that Google licenses to mobile-phone makers.”

It maintains in court filings that the Java patents Oracle claims it infringed upon are invalid because Android platform users “have a license to any patents in the case” and “Oracle made general copyright-infringement claims with nothing to back them up,” according to Gullo’s report.

As to the amount Oracle’s experts estimate the damages to be, Bloomberg reported that Google’s lawyers e-mailed a statement on June 16 that said, “Oracle’s ‘methodology’ for calculating damages is based on fundamental legal errors and improperly inflates their estimates.”  It further stated the amount of damages Oracle is claiming “is over 10 times the amount that Sun Microsystems Inc. made each year for the entirety of its Java licensing program and 20 times what Sun made for Java-based mobile licensing,” according to the report.

It has been speculated that despite Google’s motion for filing the case under seal, shareholder confidence may already have been shaken as a result of the case in general, even in absence of the disclosure of the amount of damages sought, as Google’s share price dropped 3.1 percent on Thursday.  

In other news, TMCnet reported, http://www.tmcnet.com/topics/articles/183328-google-wallet-makes-it-easier-pay-goods-through.htm “The recently-introduced Google Wallet may be the start of a new trend in how consumers pay for goods. It uses near field communication technology to allow a consumer’s smartphone to communicate with the retail store’s technology.”