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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."
$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
If SAP doesn't like it then they can cease to doing business in America and with American companies.
Please Santa, I've been a good boy and its not like I have ever asked you for much before.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
Basically SAP was illegally distributing Oracles software. They were also copying Oracles patches and reworking them so they would work with the pirated oracle software. Think of it as somebody selling bootleg windows and also supplying bootleg patches.
SAP admitted to having done it. It was estimated that if they had been selling legal licenses and service contracts it would have been anywhere between 560 million and 3 billion, so 1.3 billion is a middle ground figure.
This is one fight where Oracle actually isn't being evil and was legitimately getting ripped off.