Ninth Circuit hands copyright reprieve to Oracle in HPE suit
A federal appeals court has partially cancelled a copyright win for Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) over US software developer Oracle.
Oracle sued HPE for copyright infringement, alleging that HPE improperly accessed, downloaded, copied, and installed patches for the Solaris software programme without authorisation.
Solaris is an operating system acquired by Oracle in 2009. The dispute arose in relation to HPE’s provision of a “one-stop-shop” to support all servers its customers have, including those running Solaris software.
Oracle accused HPE of providing unauthorised patch updates for servers after the relevant support contracts with Oracle had expired.
Oracle also accused HP of subcontracting another company, Terix (not named as a defendant), to provide support for Solaris. Oracle accused HPE of direct copyright infringement, relating to the company’s own support customers, and asserted indirect infringement concerning joint HPE-Terix customers.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California issued summary judgment in favour of HP on all of the infringement claims in January 2019, finding that Oracle didn’t prove infringement by HPE and Terix in the form of unauthorised installations.
In an opinion issued yesterday, August 20, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck out that decision and ordered a new trial to determine whether HPE infringed Oracle’s copyright.
In the case of the indirect infringement claims, the Ninth Circuit said the district court failed to consider Terix’s pre-installation conduct, which it said was relevant to the case.
According to the Ninth Circuit, Oracle provided evidence that Terix reproduced and distributed patches on its servers, so that its customers could access copies of the Solaris patches.
The Ninth Circuit said that even though this evidence “appears to show direct infringement,” the district court didn’t consider it because it thought “only patch installations could constitute infringing conduct”.
The district court arrived at that conclusion based on language in Oracle’s support contracts, which allow “agents of a licensed customer” to access Solaris patches.
The district court said that Terix fell into the category of a licensed agent, but according to the Ninth Circuit, did so without properly analysing Oracle’s licenses.
In the case of direct infringement by HPE, the district court also found that data submitted by Oracle did not prove that HPE carried out unauthorised patch installations.
That’s because, the district court concluded, Oracle provided data which could not establish for certain that the patches were installed after Oracle stopped providing licensed support services for the relevant servers.
The Ninth Circuit also cancelled this part of the decision, finding that it was possible a reasonable jury could come to a different conclusion.
The district court’s summary judgment in favour of HPE was upheld with respect to all conduct prior to May 6, 2012, as this was time-barred under the Copyright Act’s three year statute of limitations.
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