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SAP Ordered To Pay $1.3 Billion To Oracle
bdcny7927 writes with news that a jury decided to award Oracle $1.3 billion in their lawsuit against SAP after deliberating for less than a day. "The verdict ... is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest US jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts... SAP spokesman Bill Wohl said the German software maker will pursue all available options, including post-trial motions and will appeal if necessary."
I don't understand how an automated download equals copyright infringement, which from my read of TFA was the central issue. Can someone explain this to me? Because otherwise, quite a few websites are going to be sued for a lot of money for providing links to other websites... something I thought we had moved past as "infringement".
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Now that is funny.
Of course, Germany should just turn around and fine Oracle or Microsoft a couple of billion to balance things out.
I don't even know the details of this case.. for all I know SAP could totally be in the right.
But I still love seeing them in pain.. after all the pain they've caused everyone else.
$1.3 billion eh? By RIAA accounting standards that sounds to me like they may have copied 7, or maybe even 8 songs! Burn!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So... an American jury finds in favor of an American company in an American court, and orders a foreign company to pay a huge sum after almost no deliberation at all.
Am I the only one reminded of how all-white juries always used to find in favor of the white victims, in courts staffed with all whites, after almost no deliberation at all, when the defendants were black? If it had been SAP suing Oracle, would the outcome have been the same, and would it have come as quickly?
Couldn't they have put a *password* on it or something? Or was it just a big free-for-all?
...LAST WEEK when it was actually news.
I'm Peggy.
The big boys are duking it out, nice to see some damage instead of the grandmother downloading a music mp3 and having to pay 50,000$. This is more of what the patent trolls were meant for, not for the end user not making money off the file sharing with another individual.
One day a lynch mob will go to Oracle's HQ and burn the place down.. deservedly so. I'm just amazed at how fast a company can become the no.1 villain in the Computer industry..
Oracle please just go away already I'm sick of seeing you in the news all the time...
What can you buy for $1.3B, considered that SAP bought Sybase for $5.8B?
Huge fail
did you forget to take your meds?
Oracle was putting on a good show while SAP tried to counter with facts. Since a bored, clueless jury is a thankful audience, the showman wins...
SAP in fact tried buying Oracle off but I guess their offer wasn't high enough. The trial mainly existed to determine the size of the fine.
Congrats on being in a very elite 1%.
SAP already admitted that they knew about the piracy.
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/sap-goes-on-record-to-admit-software-piracy-10988
It really bugs me that there seem to be these stories, mostly about copyright-related lawsuits, where the OP assumes that everyone on Slashdot knows what the lawsuit was about. Well, I don't know what Oracle sued SAP for, and if I did I forgot. Who can keep these acronyms and company names straight anyway? If it were just once I wouldn't be bothered to RTFA but I shouldn't have to RTFA just to understand the summary of a story that normally I wouldn't care that much about. These things seem to come up once every couple of days though.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
Grandmas that download a few songs. They were heavy pirates, it's just that they were prosecuted for a subset of songs. The heaviest pirates are targeted with lawsuits, it doesn't make sense to take random Grandmas to court. But I realize that the tech sites like Slashdot didn't report on that little tidbit and I will probably be voted down for mentioning it.
Damages should be based on the amount of profits Oracle lost and SAP gained from the customers who left Oracle due to the infringement, Bob Mittelstaedt, SAP’s attorney, told the jury.
Ummm...no. Damages should also be based on some sort of "punishment" factor. I would think it is important to prevent companies from simply writing off illegal activities and paying off some trivial amount of money in the even they get caught.
I wonder how a small firm like TomorrowNow with 400 service-contracts - and a net profit of ~50 mio. USD in the time frame in question - can make a such a damage.
A, maybe it's because Oracle bought the companies who made the software TomorrowNow was offering services for...
head.bang->desk();
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
The ridiculous fines the EU imposed on Microsoft a decade too late.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Does that average out to $699 per Linux user?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
One of my first managers was joking with us, and stated, "Only here, does some little guy like me have the opportunity to run a 10 million Deutsche Mark project aground!"
How do the SAP folks responsible feel about causing $1.3 billion in damages? Has anyone's head rolled for this?
I could only dream of being able to do this, "Oh, hi, boss . . . there's a little small matter that we need to talk about. I made a tiny boo boo, and it is going to cost the company $1.3 billion."
Yo.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Don't do business in or with the USA until they get there justice system sorted out and into the current century. It's just too dangerous and you will always loose to a patriotic non-professional jury that has no knowledge about law and no knowledge about the subject that provoked the lawsuit in the first place. Just look elsewhere for good customers. Asia comes to mind here. That will be where the money is being earned in 15 years from now anyway.
So... an American jury finds in favor of an American company in an American court, and orders a foreign company to pay a huge sum after almost no deliberation at all.
SAP abandoned - in August - any pretense of contesting Oracle's claims of copyright infringement. SAP Proposes Not to Contest Oracle's Copyright Claims
That implies as well that SAP had accepted the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal court.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- On the losing end of a $1.3 billion jury verdict for stealing a rival's intellectual property, SAP AG is facing the difficult decision about whether to double down -- by appealing -- or folding.
Either route is going to cost the German company dearly, and will have implications for how other technology companies approach copyrights.
A jury in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday found that SAP's behavior in plundering software and documents from archenemy Oracle Corp.'s secured websites was so egregious that it awarded Oracle nearly all of the damages it was seeking.
If SAP appeals, it will have to endure several more years of disastrous publicity, a jackpot for Oracle.
"I'm not sure what the grounds for an appeal are -- I'm not sure what the argument would be," said Patrick Walravens, an analyst with JMP Securities. "It's not like this was a trial that was done in a quick and dirty manner. It was three years and hundreds of millions in legal fees -- things were pretty well vetted."
The judge in the case still has to formally affirm the jury's verdict, and could reduce the award. An order could come sometime in the next week.
Many analysts suspect that SAP will stand down and try and figure out a way to pay one of the biggest software piracy penalties on record. Doing so would put the $10 million acquisition of the tiny, now-shuttered company called TomorrowNow that landed SAP in this mess that much farther in the rearview mirror. SAP at a crossroads after losing $1.3B verdict
+1 if you caught the reference.
Grandmas that download a few songs. They were heavy pirates, it's just that they were prosecuted for a subset of songs. The heaviest pirates are targeted with lawsuits, it doesn't make sense to take random Grandmas to court. But I realize that the tech sites like Slashdot didn't report on that little tidbit and I will probably be voted down for mentioning it.
Plenty of grandmas were sued, and this has been widely publicized, but they chose to settle. The difference between the people who went to court and those who did not was a willingness to settle, not the sympathy of the RIAA.
For reference, this award to Oracle is about the same as a jury would award based on the Thomas case if SAP had shared 100 gigabytes of music, which isn't much more than what the average college student shared on the network at my school.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
What he said is practically "Is it, perhaps, that american courts just want to fine foreign companies" and what you answered was "EU likes to fine non-EU companies". You do realize that you in no way at all refuted his point, right? (Not that it matters. I could show you many examples about EU handing out massive fines to EU companies [those just don't show up in USA news as much]... But you could, of course, show many examples of USA courts fining USA based companies. So it's pretty silly thing to ponder in the first place.)
I just got to add that the trial isn't what makes this different (MS and Intel could challenge their fines in courts if they felt that they had a valid stance) but the fact that this is a massive copyright case between two companies instead of a massive fine by regulatory entity.
your lack of citations shows that you don't even believe this bull. Better find a new job, the RIAA won't pay much for such a poor level of toadying.
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/sap-admits-liability-in-oracle-software-piracy-case-009028.php
/. defense for anything related to copyright infringement, unless of course it is related to the GPL.
Can the obligatory
Lose and loose are different words.
Oh and SAP already admitted guilt, the jury was tasked with setting the award. Sorry if that puts a damper on your little USA bash.
for sharing 572 tracks on the P2P network, including tracks by 50 Cent and Usher. After Crain denied engaging in file-sharing and rejected the RIAA's $4,500 prelitigation settlement offer, the RIAA filed suit. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/12/riaa-versus-grandma-part-ii-the-showdown-that-wasnt.ars
Sharing 572 tracks with the world != downloading a couple songs. Her name was tied to the Kazaa account as well.
These megacorps have billions in cash, a fine of 50 million might as well be a rounding error. Punitive damages against these companies should be relative to their annual profits. These types of rulings need to set a precedent, not just account for damages.
for Oracle. So you don't consider that a bad thing? Taking the work of others and profiting from it? This was a pretty egregious case, SAP has already admitted culpability and tried to settle with Oracle.
Just ask Microsoft, Apple, The SCO Group, RIm, Paul Allan, . . .
Why bother creating new, or better, products, when you can patent troll?
...oracles need lawyers.
No I have just read through the cases and can see that they did not target p2p pirates at random. It makes sense to go after the heaviest p2p pirates first and that is what they did.
But I can provide links if you would like. Take the case of Tenenbaum who admitted to having 800 files in his shared Kazaa folder but was only prosecuted for 30. It's just a legal strategy to focus on a subset of files.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/tenenbaum-takes-the-stand-i-used-p2p-and-lied-about-it.ars
I don't work for the RIAA, I'm just intellectually honest. Sorry if that bothers you.
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/sap-admits-liability-in-oracle-software-piracy-case-009028.php
The Oracle hatred distortion field seems to be blocking out this pertinent fact. Is there a way to disable it for 24 hours?
Oracle Corp. won a $1.3 billion jury verdict against rival SAP AG, the world’s largest maker of business application software, for copyright infringement by a now-defunct software maintenance unit.
The jury yesterday awarded the damages after an 11-day trial in federal court in Oakland, California. Oracle sued SAP in 2007 claiming its U.S.-based unit made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees and steal customers.
I hate SAP as much as anybody else, but I also hate Oracle (if Larry Ellison was standing here now, I'd kick him in the balls so hard, no backup would ever fix the resulting problem for him in this life time)
But saying that SAP paying 1.3 BILLION is fair?
‘Fair Number’
The panel looked at “the scope, the duration and the timing” of TomorrowNow’s conduct, the foreman said. The $1.3 billion, which was less than the $1.7 billion Oracle’s expert had recommended, took into account all the elements of damages to Oracle that had occurred, he said.
“We thought that was a fair number,” the foreman said.
“If you take something from someone and you use it, you have to pay,” Bangay, 57, an auto body technician, said.
- Oh, man, I hope for the sake of this guy, he never takes anything and just uses it without any payment upfront. No video, no song, no book, no other mechanic's tools.
You can't handle the truth.
This is a taste of what's to come for the Google / Java lawsuit. Bye bye Android.
there's no place like ~
And this redistribution causes 1.3bn damage?
Insane.
Nice going, way to feed the troll.
1.3 billion is such a large incomprehnsible sum of money. I just can't imagine how anything resembling this amount of money can be justified by anything remotly resembling justice.
One thing that I don't understand is that if SAP downloaded Oracle and then *sold* it this would seem to be a criminal act? Is anyone doing jailtime?
Anyway Oracles security track record is absolutely breathtaking. I almost spat cheerios out my nose reading that last cert advisory. Why people still use their overpriced bloatware crap is beyond me.
As for company names, Oracle and SAP are two that someone on Slashdot can be expected to know. They're like Microsoft, Apple, IBM and the like... It doesn't make much sense to explain them each time they show up (which is often). Then, summary tells us that this has something to do with a copyright lawsuit between the companies and it tells that the sum involved is 1.3B... So it is a massive sum. That info should be enough to tell you that if issues of that domain (Some of the world's biggest IP cases between some of the world's largest IT companies) interest you in any amount, you probably should RTFA here. Yeah, it doesn't have all the info about the contents of the law suit but that's what TFA is for...
How about foreign companies doing business in the USA not breaking the local laws? Maybe you should read up on the facts of the case. SAP admitted to copyright infringement and the case was just to determine damages.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
SAP will need to raise their fees.... wait, they are already too high.
And for a lot of money. You can look it up if you want. OTOH A lot of us remember the slap on the face MS got , from the US court, and if one want to call it a slap. And the other non story where nothing happened.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Oracle could have paid each juror $10 million and still had a massive ROI.
Larry Ellison winning anything is always bad news for humanity in toto.
Oracle initially took offense at TomorrowNow using manuals and patches downloaded legally on behalf of TomorrowNow clients. Oracle essentially said "You, as third-party support, cannot use the access purchased by your customer for your customer - they have to log in and download and then hand it off to the TomorrowNow engineers" Some of the customers contracting with TomorrowNow had lost their media and not patched for awhile, to catch up on patching they needed the media. Oracle charges rapacious prices to replace media, upwards of $32K! I'm betting TomorrowNow used legally downloaded media to support customers who no longer had access to support for Siebel just to be nice guys. It is possible to negotiate the price of replacement media with Oracle but it requires weeks of effort and the use of nasty language towards their 'customer service' reps. I still have psychological scarring from my go round and I 'won' a reduced cost.
'The longing to be primitive is a disease of culture' George Santayana