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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!
"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.
2.9 million in copying?
I think I want to die.
97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.
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 needs the money, otherwise Larry might be forced to switch one of the campus sushi bars over to fried chicken.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It is apparent that you have never hired a lawyer.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I have to sit back and laugh very hard because software patents are almost mutually assured destruction. I find it fun to point out the hypocrisy of companies that rail against software patents while applying for them at the same time. Google does this ... we all know. Software patents, toughened copyright laws, and other related legal maneuvering has really just created a new legal industry of sue for profit. I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing. Instead, it is being applied in a service industry. Patents were not meant to protect services but manufacturing ideas. No wonder our economy is in the toilet. We squabble over patented services while decimating manufacturing. Hell, we are even outsourcing our services now. What will be left?
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
This and a comment a few notches below reminds me of a story an old professor at my university told in an ethics class. He was an expert witness at trial where a state inspector was run over by a 'modern' paving machine. The defense lawyers requested a copy of the source code for the firmware in the machine. They came into the office one day to find on their fax machine pages and pages of printouts of the crap produced from opening the executable in Word. 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.
I think you meant $2.7M not $97M (I expect a typo) it was 97M documents, which could have each contained X pages.
There's more than just drag and drop the document folder - that probably included the labour of all the finding/sorting/sifting. I also know little to nothing about the legal system they were operating in, but it might be necessary to provide printed copies of these document - that would really start to add up. $2.7M is probably fair if that is the case.
Never happened. True story.
Those 97 million pages didn't review, organize, and where necessary redact themselves. It doesn't matter what technology you use, if you care at all about the content it is expensive to deal with that many pages of written material. It's like proof-reading an early but complete draft of Atlas Shrugged 89,000 times over except with a subtle plot and only slightly better prose. It comes out to only $32.53 per reading of Atlas Shrugged, which is a better price than I would offer.
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much.
I assume you mean $2.9 million?
Well, Oracle lost.
it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man!
No, this should be the punishment for a company that looses. Do you think that a company should be able to come up to you and request MILLIONS of documents? Do you think a company should come up to you send you legal request after legal request for documents? So what if fits on $50 hard drive? It's the labor to go through the 20 million pages. You don't want to be giving out the wrong pages that have something valuable on it not related that Oracle could steal. If the "Common Man" could read a PAGE PER SECOND every second of every day and NEVER EVER SLEEP it would take him 231 days to go through all that.
Doesn't seem like any company should just be able to to do this without repercussion to me. That would make justice impossible for the common man.
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
yYou've ignored that they are asking for $2.9M, not $97M.
Now, looking at the $2.9M figure, you're ignoring the labor costs -- you're paying someone to review and organize the docs (and either copy them or categorize them into some document management system). Assuming you're paying someone who actually knows something about software or the case, i think $30/hour is reasonable. You can pay $20/hour for an administrative assistant to a temp agency.
If they can review a document and sort it appropriately in 10 seconds, that's 360 documents/hour. $30/hour / 360 docs/hour = 8.3 cents/document. Since many documents (i.e. source code files) are probably multiple pages long, 3 cents/document sounds reasonable. You'd probably pay an agency around 10 cents/page to scan a document. Plus 2 or 3 cents for printed docs.
I commend you for inventing my new favorite unit of measurement. "You'll find the average homework for this law class to measure around 2.3 AS per night." So what's the conversion rate for Atlas Shruggeds to Fountainheads?
then they'll sue for the legal fees needed to recover the $4 mil, then for the fees for that latter action, etc.
As Zeno of Elea would've pointed out, there is no end to money that Oracle will have to pay Google.
Actually, this is an application (usually made to a clerk) to tax costs, it doesn't include legal fees (which are usually discretionary, if available to the prevailing party at all, and usually only awarded in "exceptional" cases).
geek. lawyer.
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 always assume that what they're doing is out of ignorance.
a friend of mine works for a boutique patent firm suing a larger company for violating their patent. when they asked for the source to a program that produces a ~30 line output, the larger company sent 10 gigs of source code, historic source code, accompanying documents, and other crap and told them to sift through it to find it. on top of that, they only had a month or so to go through all of it.
my point is, sometimes, its a stall tactic to drive up costs and or to just add unnecessary complications for the other side
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.
...To Google it.
yeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh.
US$ 2.9 million in copying? That's only like 3 or 4 MP3's.
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A rowboat's all you've got.
Legal fees, legal fees, legal fees, legal fees.
Can't afford a yacht.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I once sent a minitab worksheet (or whatever they're called) to the printer instead of invoking some command and sending the output from that. The thing did everything short of catching fire before someone killed it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
I know this was supposed to be funny, but the "Informative" mod is depressing.
Infinity/Infinity is undefined, just like 0/0 and Infinity/0.
There are a couple of old stories told about the government's antitrust case against IBM (eventually dropped). In the first, the government subpoenaed a list of documents. IBM said they would comply, and a few weeks later three tractor-trailer rigs pulled up at the DOJ with copies of the documents, in boxes in random order. In the second, the DOJ decided that it needed to buy a document management system to organize all the documentation it received from IBM as part of the case. The only system available at that time that was big enough to handle the volume was sold by... IBM.
It's always a fun day when you arrive at work and the company lawyers have put yellow crime-scene tape across your doorway, along with a notice that they'll be spending the day going through your paper files and making a copy of your hard disk(s). There were two amusing incidents that day. They could copy the disk in the company-supplied Windows laptop without any problem; the headless Linux boxes in the little rack in the corner gave them fits. When they got to the locked file drawer where I kept stuff provided by potential vendors under NDA, I told them that they weren't on the list of people authorized to see those documents. The legal department spent all day resolving that one internally, and eventually decided to skip that drawer.
You really need to read up on digital signatures! Archival formats too. I'm not talking about computer programs, I'm talking about data. Just about anything that would be relevant to a court case could be easily converted into something like PDF/A. While you're at it, keep going and read about trusted timestamping as well before you accuse others of ignorance.
You're thinking of a digital copy as a "fancy" paper copy, and hence you're confusing the pure digital data (an abstract mathematical description of something), with the medium it is stored in (disk, flash, computer, program, whatever). It's not "electronic paper" I'm talking about. Digital data has properties that are totally independent of the medium it is stored in. In fact, the medium doesn't matter at all, and that's the beauty of it.
If someone gives provides me with, say, a 1TB hard disk full of data -- any data -- and I get a checksum of it with a cryptographic hash like SHA-2, then there is literally no practical way for anyone to make any change whatsoever to that data without me being able to detect it later. It would be borderline impossible. The wrong-doer would literally have to revolutionize discrete mathematics first, and then would probably still require a computer the size of the entire planet. The properties of the specific disk drive are irrelevant. The same bits could have been originally stored on tape, or thumb drive, or be sent via email. Bits are just numbers, and numbers don't change because of the material they are written down onto.
It doesn't matter if the data was then circulated through thirty seedy servers in formerly communist countries for months before the trial. If it matches the checksum, then it is the same data. Exactly the same. Down to the last bit. If it doesn't match, then it has been altered. End of story. No need for a chain of custody, no need for oversight, no need for anything at all but a short number.
This is how Bittorrent works, by the way. You don't have to trust your peers! They can send you as many virus-infected blocks of data as they want, but it won't matter, because the Bittorrent client can verify the data it receives against a checksum and reject altered blocks. This is how a huge network of unknown people can work towards a common goal (sharing files), despite active attackers desperately trying to bring the system down from the inside.
Meanwhile, with paper, you have to trust people. People cheat. People make mistakes. People get bribed to do all sorts of nefarious things. Not only that, but the process of copying things with paper is glacially slow, slow enough to give wrongdoers plenty of time to alter things. For comparison, instead of months of "discovery", it would be quite practical to get a complete copy of all of the data a corporation has in a matter of minutes (their backup tapes), and then checksum it all in a few hours. Just printing it out would take weeks, months, or even years.
lim x--> inf of x/x is "infinity/infinity" and evaluates to 1.
lim x--> inf of e^x/x is also "infinity/infinity" but evaluates to infinity.
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)