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30 March 2016Copyright

Oracle seeks $9.3bn in Google copyright wrangle

Oracle is seeking nearly $10 billion in damages and profits in its long-running copyright lawsuit against Google.

The $9.3 billion figure is included in a pre-trial report compiled by James Malackowski of intellectual property research company Ocean Tomo.

Ocean Tomo, which filed its report on March 25, has been hired by Oracle as an expert witness to calculate how much money Oracle is due for copyright infringement.

The estimate includes $475 million in damages and $8.9 billion for recovered profits from Google’s sales of infringing products.

At the centre of the dispute are 37 application programming interfaces (APIs) used in Oracle’s Java computer program.

Oracle sued Google at the US District Court for the Northern District of California in 2010 claiming patent and copyright infringement.

The district court cleared Google of patent infringement, but was undecided on whether the APIs are eligible for copyright protection.

After Oracle appealed against the decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the APIs could be protected by copyright and said that Google’s Android software had infringed them.

It then sent the case back to the district court to decide whether Google’s use of the APIs was fair.

Google took the fight to the US Supreme Court but the court left the federal circuit’s ruling intact when it refused to hear the case.

The trial centring on copyright infringement is due to begin on May 9.

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29 June 2015   The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a dispute between Oracle and Google centring on whether computer programs should be eligible for copyright protection.
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27 May 2016   Google has won its latest copyright case with Oracle at the US District Court for the Northern District of California after a jury ruled yesterday that its use of application programming interfaces found in Oracle’s Java computer program was fair.
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28 March 2018   The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has revived a billion-dollar copyright clash between Oracle and Google.