Google: Sun Offered To License Java For $100M

alphadogg writes "Sun Microsystems offered to license its Java technology to Google for $100 million, a Google attorney said Thursday, attempting to show that Oracle is out of touch as it seeks billions from Google for patent infringement. Oracle and Google were in court for a hearing in Oracle's lawsuit accusing Google of patent infringement in its Android OS. Judge William Alsup was in a feisty mood, warning Oracle that 'this court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation' and telling Google that Andy Rubin, who runs its Android business, will be 'on the hot-seat' at trial. He also criticized both parties for taking unreasonable positions regarding the amount of damages owed for the alleged infringement."

Comments

Re:Greedy, Oracle.

[icebraining]

But Google used the code anyway and that's where they are in the wrong.

Uh, no, you might be confusing patents with copyright. They don't distribute Oracle's licensed code in Android itself and as far as I know, the copyright claim in the lawsuit has already been dropped.

It's pretty obvious they knew about these patents but ignored them so that puts them in the wrong.

The question is not whether they knew about them, but whether:
1) They are valid at all - (Oracle was ordered to drop 98% of them from the lawsuit)
2) They are infringing - that's up to the court to decide.

Re:Greedy, Oracle.

[silentcoder]

You're ignoring some crucial points:
1) That google chose a clean-room over SUN tech after the dealmaking failed. That is a perfectly valid defense for a copyright claim - and nothing in the evidence so far suggests that anything other than a copyright claim was ever discussed. Patent claims wouldn't be addressed by a clean-room implementation but so far there is no evidence whatsoever of willfull patent infringement.
2) The factor of willful and selective enforcement: several other organisations have built java compatible VM's and compilers (Kaffeine and gcj for example) - and never has sun or oracle sued them -despite stating their aim at java-compatibility.
3) That java itself was GPL'd prior to the oracle acquisition and teh terms of that license provides blanket patent coverage over java itself, it's only the java test-suite (used for measuring compatibility) which is licensed differently (thus remaining patentable) and this is why code such as Apache Foundation's Harmony are safe - they don't do those tests. Oracle has yet to show any proof that google ever used the test-suite.
4) Public statements by SUN employees that the java patents in question are frivolous (made stronger by the fact that they are the very employees who applied for them) and were only filed to get sun defensive patent protection, and that they even competed to see who could get the stupidest, silliest patent granted.

This case is still very much up in the air in terms of real guilt. Whether you agree with software patents or not - the simple reality is that Oracle has a lot of unanswered questions here and it's by no means clear-cut whether google did in fact infringe any patents at all - let alone what the true damage assesment should be if they did.

I find one thing from this far more disturbing: google claims that real damages should be based on android value only, and since android is zero-cost that damages must be zero-cost as well.
The judge declared that zero-cost is not applicable as their other income (ad-revenue) must be considered as tied in with this. This is very concerning because it would make the likely liability of open-source projects that are sued by patent trolls far higher, if the revenue from the supposedly infringing product is to be expanded to include revenue from any other software, service or product which in some way gets bundled or shared on that product then many open-source companies face a far higher risk in patents than they previously did.

Imagine if a company sued wordpress for patent infringement and then claimed that every ad shown on their commercial wordpress.com free blog hosting site is revenue that should count toward the calculation of patent damages ?