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.

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).

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.