eDiscovery Daily Blog
Google Beats Oracle (Again): eDiscovery Trends
In a litigation that has been going on since 2010 (we started covering it in 2011), a federal jury concluded last Thursday that Google’s Android operating system does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by “fair use.”
As reported by Ars Technica (Google beats Oracle—Android makes “fair use” of Java APIs, written by Joe Mullin), there was only one question on the special verdict form, asking if Google’s use of the Java APIs was a “fair use” under copyright law. The jury unanimously answered “yes,” in Google’s favor. The verdict ends the trial, which began earlier this month. If Oracle had won, the same jury would have gone into a “damages phase” to determine how much Google should pay. Because Google won, the trial is over – for now, at least. Oracle vowed to appeal the decision as it did after the decision in 2012 where Google was found not to have infringed Oracle’s patents, despite inadvertent disclosures of draft emails (where recipients and the words “Attorney Work Product” hadn’t yet been added) in which a Google engineer discussed the need to negotiate terms with Oracle.
Oracle’s previous appeal was heard in December 2013 and the appellate court reversed the district court on the central issue in May 2014, holding that the “structure, sequence and organization” of an API was copyrightable. The case was remanded to the district court for reconsideration only the basis of the fair use doctrine.
This time, prior to the trial starting earlier this month, U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s submitted an order urging both sides to respect the privacy of jurors after it became clear that both sides wanted that time to “scrub Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other Internet sites to extract personal data” and when asked about it, “counsel admitted this.” Ultimately, as a result of Judge Alsup’s order, both sides agreed not to mine the jurors’ social media data. Maybe Oracle wishes they had? It will be interesting to see if Oracle can obtain another reversal on appeal.
So, what do you think? Is this case finally over? Or, will it keep going and going and going? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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