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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.
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.
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 $50 hard drive? It's the labor to go through the 20 million pages. You don't want to be giving out the wrong pages that have something valuable on it not related that Oracle could steal. If the "Common Man" could read a PAGE PER SECOND every second of every day and NEVER EVER SLEEP it would take him 231 days to go through all that.
Doesn't seem like any company should just be able to to do this without repercussion to me. That would make justice impossible for the common man.
I commend you for inventing my new favorite unit of measurement. "You'll find the average homework for this law class to measure around 2.3 AS per night." So what's the conversion rate for Atlas Shruggeds to Fountainheads?
when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.
don't always assume that what they're doing is out of ignorance.
a friend of mine works for a boutique patent firm suing a larger company for violating their patent. when they asked for the source to a program that produces a ~30 line output, the larger company sent 10 gigs of source code, historic source code, accompanying documents, and other crap and told them to sift through it to find it. on top of that, they only had a month or so to go through all of it.
my point is, sometimes, its a stall tactic to drive up costs and or to just add unnecessary complications for the other side
US$ 2.9 million in copying? That's only like 3 or 4 MP3's.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.