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Oracle-Google Trial Won't Start Until Next Year

Posted by samzenpus on from the wheels-of-justice-turn-slowly dept.

angry tapir writes "The intellectual property lawsuit between Oracle and Google over the Android mobile OS won't go to trial until next year, according to a ruling made in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the judge overseeing the case. The trial was initially set to begin Oct. 31 but was postponed last week by Judge William Alsup due to scheduling conflicts with a major criminal trial. The trial will be split into three stages heard by the same jury. In step one, 'liability on the copyright claims, including all defenses thereto, will be tried and determined by special verdict before going to Phase Two,' he wrote. The second phase will cover liability on the case's patent claims, he added. 'The jury will decide these issues before going to Phase Three.' In the final stage, 'all remaining issues will be tried, including damages and willfulness.'"

4 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. SCO by bmo · · Score: 4, Informative

    It took the SCO case 7 years to resolve and they had nothing on their side.

    Google isn't going down without a fight. We'll still be reading about this in 2025.

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    BMO

    1. Re:SCO by StormReaver · · Score: 2

      The judge prevented Google from redacting the "smoking gun" email where the founder of Android (which Google bought) is quoted saying, that, yes, in fact, Android does infringe on Java....

      It says nothing of the sort. It says that all the alternatives to Java that they considered sucked, and it would be better to license Java than to consider the alternatives.

      That statement says absolutely nothing about the quality of what constitutes a Java license, and can be interpreted in a number of ways. Since at least one of those possible interpretations is damaging to Google (while most are benign), it made sense to try eliminating it from evidence. It makes sense to eliminate as much as possible of your opponent's evidence before going to court. However, it should be easy to neuter its usefulness to Oracle by focusing on the benign interpretations of that letter.

      I expect this to have almost no impact, if Google's attorneys are not asleep at the wheel.

  2. Re:Pre-judged? by m.ducharme · · Score: 2

    Perhaps you've misunderstood what "blind justice" means. It basically means that all those before the courts are treated equally, regardless of race, religion, gender, etc. Wilfulness is just a part of the element of the intent of the offender. Justice remains blind as long as, when charged with murder, each accused is assessed in the same way. If wilfulness is an element of the offence of murder, then each accused has the right to make the State prove wilfulness, and "blind justice" is preserved. Of course, in practice it doesn't always work that way.

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  3. Re:Without patents... by Anthony+Mouse · · Score: 2

    You're ignoring the original point, which is that software patents create a whole new degree of wasteful litigation on top of what you already get with copyright and contracts.

    On top of that, judges are pretty good at interpreting contracts. They do it all the time and it doesn't really require them to be software developers. Whereas trying to determine whether a software patent is "obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the art at the time of the invention" or whether a linked list and an array are "equivalent" in a particular context for purposes of the doctrine of equivalents, kind of does. Which leads to results that are wildly unpredictable and subjective, and that is the primary ingredient in the recipe for wasteful litigation.