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After Android Trial, Google Demands $4M From Oracle
MikeatWired writes "Google is seeking $4 million from Oracle to cover the costs it incurred during this spring's epic legal battle over the Android mobile operating system, reports Caleb Garling. In a brief filed in federal court on Thursday night, Google lead counsel Robert Van Nest argued that Oracle is required to pay his company's legal costs because judge and jury ruled in favor of Google on almost every issue during the six-week trial. 'Google prevailed on a substantial part of the litigation,' read Google's brief. '[Oracle] recovered none of the relief it sought in this litigation. Accordingly, Google is the prevailing party and is entitled to recover costs.' Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case."
Because it's the principle that matters!
It, unfortunately, isn't a huge surprise that some fairly epic paper-shuffling(and converting to TIFF, apparently) took place.
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
Forget Google - if even 1 percent of those 97 million documents actually needed to be printed out for this case then the entire freaking planet should sue Oracle and make them plant a new rainforest
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case.""
Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.
I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)
I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
Nah; assorted historians have pointed out that the primary function of patent law has always been to block manufacturing and development. Really, the only thing you can do with a patent is deny others the legal right to build anything based on whatever your patent covers. In theory, you can also collect royalties from licenses, but this is historically insignificant compared to the use of patents to block whatever competitors are trying to manufacture.
Historians have also pointed out that most patent holders have only rarely profited from owning a patent before the patent runs out. Typically they lose money paying for legal actions to block others' use of the patent. After it expires, however, they tend to profit because they're the experts on it, and can thus produce products based on it sooner than their competitors can.
The idea that patents are for providing income to the inventors is just a bit of legal propaganda to keep people confused enough to prevent improving the patent laws. In the real world, it hardly ever works for the patent holder's benefit. (But lawyers often make lots of money in legal patent battles. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The executable, not the source code!
Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.
Don't blame it on the lawyers not having common sense -- blame on it them having an abundance of common sense when it comes to exploiting loopholes to protect their clients. I once worked for a company that was shutting down and the lead investor wanted the source code he "owned". My boss and the corporate attorney (who were interested in resurrecting the company) wanted to give him everything he was owed without giving him what he really "wanted", so they had me send them the complete source code history out of CVS in printed form (yes, before the days of SVN and Git) - this was thousands of pages of nearly unusable source code since rewriting the whole thing was probably less work that transcribing it from printouts.
In the end everyone was happy, my boss got his company back, and the lead investor eventually got a nice return on his investment.
That's just totally false.
Print is trivially forge-able. Literally, children can do it! Haven't you ever heard of some snotty kid altering their grade report so they wouldn't get punished by their parents?
Meanwhile, a digital signature can be made so robust that nothing short of revolutionary new mathematics could be used to alter the data in any way.
On top of that, there are entirely new kinds of things that can be done with digital data, that's just impossible with print.
For example, escrow: It would be possible for a defendant to collect everything, and I mean *everything* that they have, encrypt and sign the data, and then hand it over. This ensures that the prosecution has a snapshot available at a point in time, before the defendant has had time to create forgeries. Then, based on the Judge's rulings, sections of the data can be unlocked and verified by providing the private keys for those sections at a later point. The prosecution, or the Judge, or whoever, can hold the data in escrow, without the defendant having to disclose anything unless required. However, no matter how long the legal process takes, the defendant won't have weeks or months to alter the originals, because they already handed over a snapshot at the very beginning.
Digital is not just "not inferior" to print, it's vastly superior in every way. It's cheaper to store, cheaper to copy, and trivial to search. I can be digitally signed, encrypted, and timestamped. None of that is possible with print.
I bet many people in the legal profession are smart enough to understand this. I bet that all of those in that subset are also smart enough to realize that they can continue to charge their exorbitant fees if they keep using antiquated dead-tree methods instead of modernizing.