Stefan Mileschin

Oracle has been told to write a cheque to pay Google more than $1.3 million which is the cost of trolling the search engine for its use of Java in Android.

Oracle sued Google in August 2010 alleging widespread infringement of Java-related copyrights and patents in Android and hoped that the judge would award it $6 billion.

However, Judge William Alsup of US District Court in Northern California was a programmer and actually knew more than a lot of what Oracle's lawyers did about coding. The case was thrown out and there was a small matter of Google's legal costs to work out. Google said it wasted $4 million in the case, but Alsup thinks that Oracle should pay $1.13 million of that.

According to Groklaw, Alsup wrote in his court order that Oracle recovered nothing after nearly two years of litigation and six weeks of trial. Oracle initially alleged infringement of seven patents and 132 claims.

Each claim ultimately was either dismissed with prejudice or found to be non-infringed by the jury. Oracle also lost on its primary copyright claim for Java APIs.

Even as the company's patent allegations disintegrated, Oracle fell back on an "overreaching" and "somewhat novel" theory of copyright infringement to bolster its case, Alsup growled. In otherwords Oracle continued to display trolling behavior even after it was clear it had lost.

However Google did not get everything because many of the item-line descriptions seemingly bill for 'intellectual effort' such as organising, searching, and analysing the discovery documents," Alsup wrote.

Apparently some of the cash Google wanted was for "meetings" which everyone knows are a complete waste of time but people like managers believe are vital.

Oracle is still trying to appeal the court case findings, but it is on the back foot at the moment.

http://news.techeye.net/software/ora...a-cool-million