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Oracle Not Satisfied With Potential $150,000; Goes Against Judge's Warning
bobwrit writes with news about how the monetary damages in the Google v. Oracle case might shake out. On Thursday, Judge Alsup told Oracle the most it could expect for statutory damages was a flat $150,000, a far cry from the $6.1 billion Oracle wanted in 2011, or even the $2.8 million offered by Google as a settlement. However, Oracle still thinks it can go after infringed profits, even though Judge Alsup specifically warned its lawyers they were making a mistake. He said, "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions." Groklaw has a detailed post about today's events.
Blatantly abusing the copyright of a full 9 lines of code? When I was teaching introductory CS courses, we would not even accuse students of cheating over 9 identical lines of code.
Palm trees and 8
Clearly, if Google had not developed Android, Oracle would have been able to market its own smartphone/tablet OS using Java, right?
Palm trees and 8
Yeah, because they were headed in that direction anyway. What? You don't remember Java Phone 7? iJava? JavaCE? JavaOS? PalmJava? JavaGo? Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of something else...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I understand the entire copyright thing but how the HELL is a software engineer supposed to remember every line of code that he's ever written? If he later goes to work at a different company and re-writes the same lines for a relatively simple function like this one what happens? Can it always end like this with a lawsuit? It just feels to me that it's a waste of time to go to court over a few lines of, potentially copied, code written by one man twice.