

Oracle v. Google - The Court Questions Oracle's Damages Report - Garbage
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110710090010182

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nextparadigms
That doesn't surprise me at all. It almost seemed as if Oracle is asking for
so much to make the accusation seem more _real_ , and make people think they
are right on this.

I suppose that sort of worked for RIAA when they asked for $75 _trillion_ from
Limewire. They did win, although they only got $100 million from them. Patent
and copyright trolls are quite pathetic.

~~~
6ren
An IP troll is properly a non-practicing entity. Both RIAA and Oracle provide
the IP in question.

The excessive requests are partly negotiation - in our adversarial system,
it's counsels' job, on each side, to put their case as strongly as possible,
and the judge (and jury if applicable) to decide. So they _ask_ for as much as
they can. The decisions often seem excessive to me - but that's the fault of
the judge, jury and law.

BTW: given that Google knew they were on dodgey ground when they used Java
differently from Sun's licensing, and a lot of money has changed hands based
on it, there could be a high pay-out. One guide is when Sun sued Microsoft for
breaking compatibility with Java: $20 million
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#Sun_vs._Microsoft)
(though MS was happy with the outcome, and I think they know they got off
lightly). OTOH, when Oracle sued SAP for some dodgey business practices, they
won $1.3 billion
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#Sun_vs._Microsoft)
(SAP wasn't happy).

