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Oracle Asks Judge To Throw Out Java/Google Verdict...Again (siliconvalley.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the pretty-please? dept.

Just when you thought the six-year, $9 billion lawsuit was over, an anonymous reader quotes this report from the Bay Area Newsgroup: Oracle has asked a judge -- again -- to throw out the verdict that found Google rightfully helped itself to Oracle programming code to create the Android operating system... A judge already rejected a bid in May by Oracle to get the verdict thrown out. But the software and cloud company hasn't given up. On July 6, Oracle filed a motion in San Francisco U.S. District Court again asking the same judge, William Alsup, to toss the verdict.

The company cited case law suggesting use is not legal if the user "exclusively acquires conspicuous financial rewards'' from its use of the copyrighted material. Google, said Oracle, has earned more than $42 billion from Android. "Google's financial rewards are as 'conspicuous' as they come, and unprecedented in the case law," Oracle's filing said. Oracle wants the judge to adhere to the narrower and more traditional applications of fair use, "for example, when it is 'criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching ... scholarship, or research.'"

6 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Court motions are not news by Kohath · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Filing a court motion is not news. Appealing a ruling is not news. They are pro forma. It would be more newsworthy if they didn't happen.

    1. Re:Court motions are not news by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oracle didn't do any work on Java. Sun did. Sun invested a lot of time and money into Java, then ultimately, turned it over to outside developers. Sun still held "title" to Java, I suppose, but they did little to nothing to "protect" their copyright. Open sourced, freely distributed, outside developers encouraged to develop, and tacit consent given to use Java however the hell you want to use it.

      Let's put this in perspective. You make something, and you allow all your neighbors to use that something. Let's say it's a water park. All the kids in town come to your place to play in the water. After a few years, I come along, and offer you some money for your water park, and you take the money. With the water park safely in my possession, I start suing all the families in town for using the water park.

      Does that scenario make ANY sense to you? I sure as hell hope not.

      In my most honest opinion, Oracle has no claim to anything that has been done with Java. If, and only if, Oracle develops some new aspect of Java, then Oracle will have full right and title to those newly explored aspects of Java. At least until someone reverse engineers it, and reproduces the results with different code.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    2. Re:Court motions are not news by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sun still held "title" to Java, I suppose, but they did little to nothing to "protect" their copyright.

      you don't need to protect a copyright, you're getting confused with trademark, which does need to be defended to some degree.

      Does that scenario make ANY sense to you? I sure as hell hope not.

      It really didn't!

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re: NUKE ORACLE by WarJolt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We were too busy watching SCO go bankrupt. Now we can watch oracle.

  3. Spin article? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Google rightfully helped itself to Oracle programming code"... no, the court found that the APIs definitions do not constitute code. Which is absolutely right.
    The few lines of actual code that were the same (you know, code, the stuff that converts to machine code that runs on the processor), was so insignificant as to be nothing.

    Oracle have lied, spun, deceived, all the way through this. If the judge/jury had found any different then Oracle would own Dalvik, the VM written separately by a different group of people, from scratch, simply because it implements the same API and competes with Oracles more recent purchase of Sun, which gave it Java.

    "Google, said Oracle, has earned "

    Google earn nothing from Android, it's given away free to handset makers, they make money on the Google Play bundle which they license to manufacturers and on the online services and advertising sold to Android customers.

    "Oracle wants the judge to adhere to the narrower and more traditional applications of fair use"

    He did, Oracle did not invent SQL, they implemented their own version of it.
    WABI, the windows clone on Sun kit, owned by Oracle, they did not violate Microsoft's copyright, Sun made their own version of it.

    QUIT FOOKING LYING ORACLE.

  4. Re:Given how much that would bite themselves... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "everybody has to write new APIs, or come up with a completely new and properly open source set of APIs that do not infringe on any of the thousands to millions of APIs currently copyrighted" Sounds like a good reason to start innovating instead of copying or demanding the free use of someone else's work. Don't want to pay to use someone else's technology? Nothing is stopping you from developing your own solutions. And this battle over Java is a perfect example of wasting money on lawyers instead of putting that money towards replacing Java, which is legacy technology, with something better. Something built from the ground up that takes advantage of the heightened awareness of security models. Something that can really take advantage of multi-core processors. As it stands Java is just one big patch that has had security and hardware architecture changes shoe horned into the runtime engine. (Java is not the only framework with these problems) Some brave soul is going to come along and say fuck backwards compatibility and start building something new. After all someone actually did this when they bet the farm on the PC replacing the functionality that up until that time was running on mainframes and mid-range platforms.