In Google-Oracle Trial Over Android, Greed Doesn't Matter To Judge

By Dan Levine

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Greed does not matter when it comes to the legal battle of two Silicon Valley icons, a federal judge told jurors who are hearing the lawsuit Oracle filed against Google.

"There has been a suggestion made that greed is at work here," U.S. District Judge William Alsup said on Friday. "That doesn't matter."

His remarks served as a caution to the seven women and five men who are expected to begin their deliberations on Oracle's copyright claims next week.

Oracle is suing Google in federal court claiming the search engine giant violated its intellectual property rights to the Java programming language and is seeking roughly $1 billion in copyright damages.

The judge explained that the motives of both sides in pre-trial negotiations are irrelevant to their verdict.

Oracle contends that some of the platform Google's Android runs on, Java, violates its intellectual property. Google says it does not violate Oracle's patents and that Oracle cannot copyright certain parts of Java, an "open-source," or publicly available, software language.

Attorneys for Google have suggested that Oracle only filed a lawsuit after it decided it would not try to develop a smartphone of its own. But Oracle's final witness, its president and chief financial officer disputed that idea.

"That couldn't be further from the truth," Safra Catz testified.

The trial, expected to last at least eight weeks, has been divided into three phases: copyright liability, patent claims, and damages.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.

(Reporting By Dan Levine; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

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Comments

[sabrina D]

06:28 AM on 04/30/2012

What happened to oracle?

[AoC]

10:58 PM on 04/30/2012

The decided to take the SCO track in order to remain relevant and profitable. In other words to stay in business

[flashfyre]

09:06 PM on 04/29/2012

Google's refused to buy an ME license because they didn't want to collaborate with Sun.

Oracle bought Sun on the cheap and now wants to do a barrel roll on Sun's "look the other way" policy.

I don't that will fly--google had grudging permission to clean room java through most of Android's development.

[sfurr]

01:07 PM on 04/30/2012

Your argument means nothing from a legal standpoint.

What is grudging permission? Do they have a license? No, I thought not. Unlike trademarks, copyright doesn't need to be aggressively protected to make a future claim, so some abstract notion of acquiescence will carry zero weight.

To the extent that Oracle bases their copyright claims on whether Java as a programming language is a copyrightable expression is very interesting, and the legal clarity it brings will hopefully be beneficial. I expect that copyright claims on the Java Programming Language specifications (lowercase, the actual syntax and semantics not the text) will be denied and that will help weaken copyright claims on APIs.

[flashfyre]

12:23 AM on 05/01/2012

Gosling the author admitted Sun leaned away from litigation, except for the case of MS, who was licensee and violated the terms.

Sounds like grudging to me, McNealy the CEO practically used those words. Schwarz the CEO disagreed with his former boss' assessment.

GNU classpath, Kaffe, IBM J9 should not be ignored.

[Max Sevilla]

07:10 PM on 04/29/2012

This is a war on open source. Shame on Oracle.”

[RattleCat]

10:06 AM on 04/29/2012

Oracle will probably win. First, its hard for Google to argue that the patents do not apply when years before they were locked in negotiations with Sun for license rights to those same patents.  And second, the evidence introduced during the trial certainly suggests that Google chose to move forward with full knowledge that licensing was required.  

I don't know why they just didn't license five years ago.  Every other major company does, and Google certainly has the war_chest to afford it.  If the jury decides against them, its yet another blemish on their 'Don't Be Evil"   meme.

[jsarets]

12:50 PM on 04/29/2012

First, all but one of the asserted patents have been invalidated upon further review, and it's questionable whether Android actually infringes the only remaining patent. The suit as it exists today is mostly about the copyright claims.

When Google originally wanted to license the JDK from Sun, the sticking point was the TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit). Sun would only license the JDK for use in implementations which pass an extensive compatibility test suite. Google did not want to support certain Java features on Android, particularly its legacy GUI frameworks: AWT and Swing.

So instead of licensing Sun's JDK, they developed their own implementation based on the Apache Harmony project, which was started by IBM as a project to reverse-engineer Java from scratch and release it under the open-source Apache license. Midway through the development of Android, Sun released OpenJDK under the GPL license. IBM abandoned Apache Harmony in favor of OpenJDK, leaving Google on its own.

The Android SDK is only superficially similar to the JDK. The virtual machine (Dalvik) is register-based rather than stack-based, and it runs a very different bytecode format generated by a new compiler. The standard class libraries from Harmony were reverse-engineered before Sun open-sourced their JDK, and Google developed extensive class libraries for Android, particularly the GUI stack and the component framework.

The only parts of Android that are identical to Java are the grammar definitions for the language parser and the interface declarations for the standard class libraries. There's only one correct way to express those interfaces. Otherwise it's a complete re-write.

The key here is the TCK. Google preferred to use Java, because that's what they teach the kids in school, but they would not have used Java if it meant they had to allow Android apps to use AWT and Swing. That was a deal-breaker. It would have been a disaster.

[IDIOTA]

05:58 PM on 04/29/2012

That was so lucid -- are you a professional in the technology field? My son is going to take an Android class at a CC, but one of the prerequisites is knowledge of Swing and AWT classes. Now I don't why that should be the case unless Dalvik converts AWT and Swing for Android purposes. What puzzles me is why it is so difficult to install the Android Development environment on a Mac OSX machine. It should be straightforward, but it isn't. It would seem that Apple does not want Android development competing with Objective-C, but I can assert that with any proof except mine and my son's frustration as Mac owners.

[Max Sevilla]

10:02 PM on 04/28/2012

This is a war on open source. Shame on Oracle.

[Tsvi1]

10:20 AM on 04/29/2012

Java has never and will never be Open Source. Using it is hypocritical if you are part of the open source crowd, use things which are.

[jsarets]

11:59 AM on 04/29/2012

Oracle distributes OpenJDK under the GPL license.

[Left on Red]

08:35 PM on 04/28/2012

Principle over Greed - The Anti-GOP

[Chris Smart]

07:56 PM on 04/28/2012

This is a war on open source. Shame on Oracle.

[thebuzzmanisone]

04:42 PM on 04/28/2012

open source is open otherwise dont make it open

[ProudToBeVeryLiberal]

05:06 PM on 04/28/2012

Yep, seems like OracIe wants to have it both ways.

[MWA1111]

05:31 PM on 04/28/2012

Agreed! And I'll take one of those microbrews too please.

[Sanders McGrillin]

03:46 PM on 04/28/2012

Interesting....

[stargazer13]

03:28 PM on 04/28/2012

Oracle wins it,s case :)

[thebuzzmanisone]

04:41 PM on 04/28/2012

how do you figure that?