Google-Oracle Trial Begins Over Android Copyright Infringement

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle and Google are set to face each other in court in San Francisco on Monday.

The dispute hinges on Oracle's allegations that Google's widely used Android software for mobile devices infringes on copyrights and patents that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.3 billion in 2010. The technology in question is Java, a programming language that has been around since the 1990s.

Oracle Corp., a business software maker with $36 billion in annual revenue, is seeking hundreds of millions in damages.

Google Inc., which relies on its dominance of Internet search and advertising for most of its $38 billion in annual revenue, believes it won't have to pay more than a few million dollars.

The jury trial before U.S. District Judge William Alsup has been separated into three different phases covering copyright claims, patent claims and damages. The final phase won't be necessary if Google prevails in its defense against the allegations of copyright and patent infringement.

Each phase is supposed to last two weeks, although Alsup has allotted eight weeks for the entire trial in case there are unexpected delays or other twists. The first phase covering copyrights is likely to be the most important. Oracle is seeking several hundred million dollars in damages for the alleged copyright infringement on some of Java's programming features.

Google CEO Larry Page and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a pair of multibillionaires whose innovations have reshaped the world, are each expected to testify during the opening phase.

Jury selection begins Monday. Alsup has told the parties that opening statements and possibly the first witness could come Monday as well.

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Comments

[Icky People]

01:30 PM on 04/16/2012

Google ripped off Apple and cloned iOS, named it Android, then refused for years to agree to a licensing deal to use Java on their stolen OS and now have to pay up. It's a shame Apple no longer wants to directly sue Google over ripping off iOS. Google was once a good company, but all they do now is steal other's work and call it their own.

[tcordier]

01:38 PM on 04/16/2012

Steve Jobs: "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."

QED

[Proud Bay Man]

08:39 PM on 04/16/2012

That was actually said by Pablo Picasso, and it was, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

[J0E1]

02:40 PM on 04/16/2012

Whether or not Android 1.0 was a "cloned iOS"  future iterations of Android have blown way past iOS in features and functionality.  iOS 5 is now racing to catch up by cloning Android features.  Their best attempt at coming out with a "unique" feature is including a half-arsed, untested, "beta" software called Siri.

[capitaldistrictgeek]

11:42 AM on 04/16/2012

I'm a Java programmer... I've tried working with J2ME; I didn't like it. You were totally dependent on a phone manufacturer building support in, the API was limited, and everything seemed to have been designed around the crappy screens of old feature phones rather than smartphones.

Android, on the other hand, is very appealing to me. It primarily targets smartphones, looks fantastic, supports game engines, and in general does everything you might ever want to do on a mobile device. It's catnip for us Java guys.

What Oracle SHOULD have done was realize how much better Android was than J2ME, retire J2ME, embrace Android, and release professional tools that target Android. They could have done a trade with Google, free license to Android for free license to Oracle's Java patents. Mobile development would have become even easier. Sadly, they tried to litigate against Android and support J2ME. It doesn't make any sense.

I like to use my "Zombie Analogy": Think of this as a zombie movie. Oracle is the male protagonist, J2ME is the zombie, and Android/Google are a couple of hot twin girls in fuzzy white cutoff sweaters and short skirts who want to be rescued from the zombie. Now, a NORMAL person would kill the zombie and spend the weekend with the two girls, right? But Oracle decides to attack the two girls and kiss the zombie. Meanwhile, programmers everywhere are throwing popcorn at the screen and yelling "NOOOOO! You're doin' it wrong!"

[groucho42]

12:20 PM on 04/16/2012

A very well written review of your technology preferences, but it has nothing to do with the facts of the case. The question isn't which product is better, it's who owns the right to Java.

[peterhenry]

12:49 PM on 04/16/2012

Unfortunately, it's not really about who owns Java. It's a theory about whether the API's definitions are protected.

Think SCO.

[capitaldistrictgeek]

02:00 PM on 04/16/2012

Most of my post was NOT about my "technology preferences", but a critique of Oracle's using patents and copyrights to try and force the world to use an inferior product (J2ME) instead of a far superior one (Android). Oracle has thrown its weight behind J2ME, a technology that is all but dead. It's amazing to me that they can't see how foolish this is.

To the point: in my opinion, this case is clearly NOT about "who owns the right to Java" but about whether Oracle can use patents and copyright to force a superior competitor out of the market. All technology professionals should be appalled that this is happening.

[theveggiedude]

11:42 AM on 04/16/2012

Google is in a no-win situation here. If they win against Oracle, then Amazon knows it can hijack Android in the same fashion Google had done to Java. The Kindle Fire already has its own variant of Android, and is the most popular Android tablet today. It has its own eco-system, independent of Google. Amazon could take it further to differentiate it from the rest of Android, and wrestle away control as it slowly dominates that platform.

[JosephTX]

01:21 PM on 04/16/2012

Amazon could legally do that whenever they want. Android is based on the Linux kernel which means it's licensed under the GNU General Public License, which states that no derived works of Linux or GNU have to be open-source and open to modification.

[JosephTX]

01:57 PM on 04/16/2012

oops, correction: derived works HAVE to be open-source and free for modification. Amazon just doesn't do that because it's an online vendor company, not one of the world's leading software developers.

[jsarets]

02:49 PM on 04/16/2012

The Linux kernel is the only major component of Android which is licensed under the GPL. Almost everything else is licensed under the Apache 2.0 or various BSD/MIT-like licenses. These are not "copyleft" reciprocal licenses, so derived works do not have to be open-sourced.

[RevSpaminator]

03:03 PM on 04/16/2012

Your analysis of Amazon is very short sighted. Amazon would lose more than Google if they were to "hijack" Android. (Being open source the better analogy would be "fork".) Amazon devices benefit more from being Android than from being proprietary. Software, community support, OS releases, etc are all being developed and financed by Google with no cost to Amazon.

[theveggiedude]

07:11 PM on 04/16/2012

The Kindle Fire has it's own eco-system, and it is completely proprietary. It's app store may not be 100% compatible with Google's approved apps, but in a year or two that may not matter - maybe developers will prefer the Amazon method over what Google offers.

[ResearchtheFacts]

11:36 AM on 04/16/2012

Title so misleading, and such a stretch. The fate of android?  So much drama when the question is how much will Google have to pay for what.

[Marc1940]

11:21 AM on 04/16/2012

These guys are just playing patent games. The lawyers are become one of the 1%.

[peterhenry]

12:52 PM on 04/16/2012

case has nothing to do with patents. only copyrights. educate yourself. groklaw.net

[CSDofNM]

04:19 PM on 04/16/2012

Not that any lawyers have ever misapplied copyrights or patents just to control a market.

[MikeyG]

10:53 AM on 04/16/2012

Those that can't innovate litigate. Oracle started out as an innovator, but the corporate way has led them to the dust bin of tech history. They still have lots of money though, so they buy ideas instead. What a sad shell of a company, Larry E must be so ashamed.

[Brian Hudson]

12:53 PM on 04/16/2012

"Those that can't innovate litigate."

It's incredible how often I see this nugget of "conventional wisdom" trotted out in every patent infringement lawsuit thread. Let me ask: Is there ANY circumstance where you feel a company SHOULD legally defend their IP?

[jonny dipstick]

10:22 AM on 04/16/2012

This patent stuff is really making me mad. They buy up patents and just wait to sue someone. Its a total misuse of what patents are for and it shouldn't be allowed. Inventions should be flowing freely.

[CSDofNM]

04:24 PM on 04/16/2012

No, the founding fathers designed the patent system so that those who added to our ability to do things would be rewarded for it (Remember Ben Franklin was a prolific patent generator).

The system has been hijacked by corporate litigators for use as market protection, quite the opposite of what the founders intended. Instead of licensing inventions, they are keeping others FROM licensing the inventions.

Modern law often stands the Constitution on its head.

[jonny dipstick]

04:30 PM on 04/16/2012

yes it does. good point.

[Mithrilknight]

09:39 AM on 04/16/2012

And Apple, but enforcing use of it's own proprietary language, need not fear lawsuits.

[jsarets]

10:17 AM on 04/16/2012

Objective-C is a layer which sits on top of straight C, providing syntactic sugar and garbage collection for object-oriented programming. Apple XCode uses the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which is the same open-source compiler toolchain used to build software for Linux (including Android).

[CSDofNM]

04:27 PM on 04/16/2012

Objective-C is a very different product from C++. Objective-C was first, and in many ways, a better product. But C++ has the standards and tools. Objective-C is in the toolchain, but it is a different thing, just like GCL (Common Lisp) is a different language in the same toolchain.

[jsarets]

09:37 AM on 04/16/2012

Oracle is seeking several hundred million dollars in damages for the alleged copyright infringement on some of Java's programming features.

This AP goober obviously has no clue what they're talking about. Copyright protects against the un authorized distribution of exact (or nearly-exact) copies of a covered work. It's not enough to copy "features". You have to copy the code itself in order to be guilty of copyright infringement.

Patents are a different story.

[galvestonguy68]

12:31 PM on 04/16/2012

Not strictly true 'features' that constitute 'look and feel' can also be subject to copyright.

[peterhenry]

12:50 PM on 04/16/2012

Not since Borland

[CSDofNM]

04:28 PM on 04/16/2012

Has to be like SuperCalc vs VisiCalc - almost indestinguishable. Doesn't apply to API's and code constructs (unless identical).

[bikerdude]

09:04 AM on 04/16/2012

I'm betting that Oracle has been in court MORE than any other high tech company in history.

[jsarets]

09:43 AM on 04/16/2012

Nobody can compete with AT&T/Bell Labs. They practically lived in court throughout the 1980s and early 1990s suing everybody in the computer, software, and networking industries. Otherwise Linux would have never came to be, and Sun would have likely swallowed up Oracle rather than the other way around.

[bikerdude]

11:05 AM on 04/16/2012

You are right about the ATT/Bell Labs thing. Since they have been broken up, I just forgot about them.