Oracle To Pay Google $1 Million For Lawyer Fees In Failed Patent Case

eldavojohn writes "You may recall the news that Google would not be paying Oracle for Oracle's intellectual property claims against the search giant. Instead, Google requested $4.03 million for lawyer fees in the case. The judge denied some $2.9 million of those fees and instead settled on $1.13 million as an appropriate number for legal costs. Although this is relative peanuts to the two giants, Groklaw breaks the ruling down into more minute detail for anyone curious on what risks and repercussions are involved with patent trolling."

Comments

Larry, who's your daddy?

[Pecisk]

Google, Larry, Google.

Re:Larry, who's your daddy?

[crypticedge]

Ellison, not Page

Ellison is CEO of Oracle

Pocket change

[vlm]

settled on $1.13 million

Whoa... Oracle is going to have to sell like ONE extra enterprise edition license this month.

I'm amazed that place is still able to charge what they do. Its like trying to make money "selling" a unix clone.

Re:Pocket change

[fm6]

Or else Larry can postpone his next yacht purchase for a few weeks.

There's a lot of free DBMS software out there, but Oracle's isn't a clone of it, any more than Windows is a clone of Linux. Oracle has a gigantic ecosystem of users who depend on the fact that there's a big pool of Oracle-trained developers out there. And of course a lot of users are locked in by having Oracle-based infrastructure that's taken them decades to develop. None of these are in a position to move to PostgreSQL, never mind MySQL.

Re:pocket change

[MightyMartian]

It was the most ludicrous part of the whole case. There is case law firmly stating that APIs, libraries, language and protocol specifications themselves cannot be copyrighted, as they are nothing more than the equivalent of a phone book. I can't believe anyone seriously thought that Oracle had a chance with this. On the whole, the patent part of the case was stronger, and that was pretty weak. I have to believe Ellison's lawyers were telling him not to proceed, but I suppose if faced with the last remaining jewel from the Sun crown that meant a damned thing, maybe I'd take my chances, no matter how slim, on a court case.

Re:pocket change

[clonehappy]

It's not chump change, but I think most people fail to realize that the Samsung corporation is much more than just Samsung Electronics, the TV, cellphone and electronic gadget maker.. This link should give people an idea of how big Samsung really is.

A billion, while it hurts, doesn't hurt all that bad.

Re:pocket change

[icebike]

The other thing to realize is that Samsung is one of Apple's biggest suppliers, and one that Apple can't avoid.

Simply by imposing the industry standard cost escalator contract clause they recoup the entire Billion in one year from Apple.
Piss Samsung off too badly, and "shortages" could develop.

Apple still needs Samsung, but Samsung has a wealth of customers these days.

Re:Pocket change

[viperidaenz]

You mean the MySQL that is owned by Oracle?

Re:pocket change

[viperidaenz]

Exactly. Samsung is huge
Apple Revenue: 108b. Samsung: 247b
Apple Assets: 116b. Samsung: 348b
Apple Equity: 76b. Samsung: 224b
Apple Employees: 60k. Samsung: 344k

Patents

[GeneralTurgidson]

The bailout for the lawyer industry.

Re:Patents

[icebike]

Ah, no.
The process from beginning to nearly the end was about patents. Google ended up getting virtually all of them invalidated, and Oracle tried to fall back on copyright.
Go read Groklaw:

Oracle initially alleged infringement of seven patents and 132 claims but each claim ultimately was either dismissed with prejudice or found to be non-infringed by the jury. ... Oracle’s first damages report barely mentioned copyright claims), ... but instead fell back on an overreaching (albeit somewhat novel) theory of copyright infringement for its own financial interests late in litigation.

Uncanny How FloMu Was Right!

[Freshly Exhumed]

Florian Mueller predicted this perfectly except that the other side won.

Re:Uncanny How FloMu Was Right!

[icebike]

Yes, its amazing just how many bloggers are running away from their predictions:

It's all but said and done that Oracle is going to have some kind of pay day. During a court hearing last July, Judge Alsup admitted that Google is definitely going to pay up "probably in the millions, maybe in the billions" at some point.

Rachel King April 16, 2012.

SF Gate, on the other hand pretty much predicted this outcome just 9 days later on April 25, 2012:

The remarkable thing is that, when the dust settles, five of the seven patents Oracle claimed that Google violated will likely be overturned because Google forced the patent office to take a second look. ...
If only two of Oracle's patents hold up on review, that means the patent office got it right less than 30 percent of the time, an average we have every reason to believe is representative of the entire sector's patents. In fact, software patent holders lose nearly 90 percent of the time in litigation, Stanford law Professor Mark Lemley found in a research paper published last year.

The courts would do best if they just struck down software patents again, as they have done three times in the past.

Even the output from software should not be patentable (slide to unlock).

Reduced award

[puddingebola]

Judge substatntially reduced the award after Google's lawyers were shown to have been playing Angry Birds during plaintiff's closing argument.

Re:Ediscovery!

[icebike]

Google asked for $4 million. Of that, $3 million was for electronic discovery, which the judge disallowed. Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.

Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.

Actually Groklaw does explain why the e-discovery costs were denied:

However, “fees for exemplification and copying are permitted only for the physical preparation and duplication of documents, not the intellectual effort involved in their production.” ...
The problem with Google’s e-discovery bill of costs is that many of item-line descriptions seemingly bill for “intellectual effort” such as organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents.

They made a billing error. They tried to bill consultant "think" time as document prep time.

Had they done this work with lawyers they may have been able to bill it, but on the other hand by doing it with researchers and analysts the actually prevailed where it is less likely lawyers alone would have done so, not being specialists in this particular type of research. I suspect Google will take that outcome any day.

Re:Haha Larry

[MightyMartian]

But a court slapdown that means Oracle loses any control of the Java language it asserted it had is a pretty major loss. Oracle's purchase of Sun is proving to be a pretty crappy investment all in all.

Re:Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.

[Chrisq]

Do you fools really think any man is going to be motivated by "good"?

Some undoubtedly are, but you will find them on cruise ships operating on kids in third world countries, not running companies

Re:Haha Larry

[fm6]

Sigh. I was working for Sun during most of the acquisition process, and I get so tired of hearing that the acquisition was about Java. Sun cost Oracle $5.6 billion. No way is a not very profitable piece of software worth that much.

The one thing everybody knows about Sun is that they invented Java, so everybody takes it for granted that Java was an important profit center for Sun. It most assuredly was not. Most of Sun's income came from selling hardware. Oracle was promising to make billions moving Sun hardware through Oracle sales channels. This was plausible not only because Oracle's sales organization was huge (at the time, it employed more people than all of Sun), but because anybody who buys Oracle software also has to buy a computer to run it on.

(I was so looking forward to working for Oracle; Sun middle management was a nasty combination of old hands who still thought that SPARC had a future and mindless bureaucrats who made bad decisions because it kept the paperwork tidy. Alas, the mindless bureaucrats decided I was a nuisance. Shouldn't have tried so hard to do good work for them.)

This acquisition didn't work out, but that had nothing to do with Java. The problem is that the name-brand hardware is a dying business. HP is in trouble. Dell is in trouble. IBM isn't in trouble, but only because they've deemphasized hardware in favor of service. It's hard to tell if Lenovo is in trouble, because they're basically owned by the Chinese government, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Name brand hardware can't compete with cheap generic hardware. Its only selling point is that it's more powerful and reliable than generic hardware. But if you're running a cloud-oriented data center, you don't care about power or reliability. You buy more systems to make up for the decreased power, and you set up the cloud so that unreliable systems don't impact overall reliability.

Oracle's mistake was to try to become IBM at a time when IBM was following the more sensible course of becoming Oracle.

Re:Haha Larry

[MightyMartian]

If oracle could have got its claws into Android to extort some licensing fees, it would have done a helluva lot for the bottom line.

Re:Ediscovery!

[DragonWriter]

Groklaw says that it's usual for a claim to be reduced, but that doesn't explain why he disallowed this particular cost.

This is addressed in the text of the order, which is presented in the Groklaw piece:

4. E-DISCOVERY COSTS.

Google's bill of costs seeks nearly three million dollars in fees incurred by e-discovery vendor, FTI Consulting, Inc. Oracle objects.

Pursuant to Section 1920, the Court may tax "fees for exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials where the copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case." Our local rule has interpreted the statute to provide for "[t]he cost of reproducing disclosure or formal discovery documents when used for any purpose in the case." CIVIL L.R. 54-3(d)(2). However, "fees for exemplification and copying are permitted only for the physical preparation and duplication of documents, not the intellectual effort involved in their production." Zuill v. Shanahan, 80 F.3d 1366, 1371 (9th Cir. 1996) (quotations omitted). In Romero, our court of appeals held that the research, analysis, and distillation of data incurred in the preparation of documents (as oppose to the costs of physically preparing the documents) were not taxable costs. Romero v. City of Pomona, 883 F.2d 1418, 1427 (9th Cir. 1989).

The problem with Google's e-discovery bill of costs is that many of item-line descriptions seemingly bill for "intellectual effort" such as organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents (see, e.g., Dkt. No. 1220, Exh. B at 1, 2-4, 8-10). Most egregious are attempts to bill costs for "conferencing," "prepare for and participate in kickoff call," and communications with co-workers, other vendors, and clients (see, e.g., id. at 2, 9-10, 14). These are non-taxable intellectual efforts.

Back to your post:

Electronic discovery is basically about using advanced software to do forensic analysis of discovery documents. I find it really interesting that Google spent three times as much on this as they spent on paying lawyers to actually argue the case.

A lot more than three times as much as they spent on paying "lawyers to actually argue the case". Per the court order on costs, the $1.13 million in Google's costs that Oracle was ordered to pay included, "nearly one million dollars in fees arising from the work of court-appointed expert Dr. James Kearl."

While the remaining costs aren't broken down further in the order -- and I will cop to being too lazy to dig up the costs Google filed to figure it out in detail -- it seems like the upper bound on the amount that was actually to pay "for lawyers to actually argue the case" was on the order of a couple hundred thousand dollars.

But none of this is surprising. As much as lawyers charge for their time, most of the cost associated with a trial isn't legal fees. This is rather normal.