Oracle Seeks ‘Billions’ From Google in Java Patent Lawsuit

June 17, 2011, 8:50 PM EDT By Karen Gullo

(Updates with Google’s objections in fifth paragraph.)

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- Oracle Corp. is seeking as much as $6.1 billion in damages in a patent- and copyright-infringement lawsuit against Google Inc. that claims the search-engine company’s Android software uses technology related to the Java programming language, according to court papers.

The extent of the claims was disclosed yesterday in San Francisco federal court by Oracle, as it sought to prevent Google from filing under seal documents in the case stating Oracle’s monetary claims.

“Oracle’s damages claims in this case are in the billions of dollars,” the company said in a filing, arguing that its demands “are based on both accepted methodology and a wealth of concrete evidence.”

“They should not be hidden from public view,” Oracle said.

Google said in a June 6 letter to U.S. District Judge William Alsup, posted today on the court’s online docket, that Oracle’s damages expert estimated Google would owe Oracle between $1.4 billion and $6.1 billion in damages if it was found liable for infringement.

‘Breathtaking Figure’

“A breathtaking figure that is out of proportion to any meaningful measure of the intellectual property at issue,” Google’s lawyers said in the letter. Even the low end of the range “is over 10 times the amount that Sun Microsystems Inc. made each year for the entirety of its Java licensing program and 20 times what Sun made for Java-based mobile licensing.”

Google said the damages expert’s testimony should be excluded because the expert inflated royalty rates that may be owed by Google. Android is a smartphone operating system that Google licenses to mobile-phone makers.

“Oracle’s ‘methodology’ for calculating damages is based on fundamental legal errors and improperly inflates their estimates,” the company said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.

Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle, declined to comment.

Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, got Java when it bought Sun Microsystems Inc. in January 2010. The company sued Google the following August seeking a court ruling that would ban further use of its intellectual property and force the destruction of all products that violate Java-related copyrights on the code, documentation and specifications.

Dalvik Software

Oracle’s complaint targets Google virtual machine software called Dalvik that is used in running Android applications. Oracle said the software infringes its Java patents and that Google didn’t obtain a license to use Java in its products.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, said in court filings that the patents are invalid and not infringed and that users of the Android platform have a license to any patents in the case. It said Oracle made general copyright-infringement claims with nothing to back them up.

Researcher IDC expects the Android operating system to have more than 40 percent of the global smartphone market in the second half of 2011.

Oracle rose 39 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $31.19 at the close of Nasdaq Stock Market trading in New York. Google fell $15.35, or 3.1 percent, to $485.02.

The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10-03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

--With assistance from Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles, Aaron Ricadela in San Francisco and Zachary Tracer in New York. Editors: Andrew Dunn, Stephen Farr.

To contact the reporter on this story: Karen Gullo in San Francisco at kgullo@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net.

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