14 DAY TRIAL // The complicated six-year legal battle between Google and Oracle is about to resume this April, and according to a series of new documents, Oracle is now seeking damages of $9.3 billion (€8.3 billion).
Oracle's quarrel with Google started in 2012, when Big Red sued Google for copyright infringement relating to Google's usage of Java in the source code of its Android operating system.
The case went back and forward for the first years, and at first, Google won the dispute. The decision was reversed during the appeal, and last year, at the White House's suggestion, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Google's case, resending it to the lower courts for a retrial.
Oracle vs. Google retrial scheduled for April 27
In this new round of litigation, the US Supreme Court has asked the district court judge to hear the trial on the basis of fair use of the Java APIs, and not as a copyright infringement dispute.
Oracle had initially claimed that Google, despite Java's GPL open license, had copied the internal structure of some of the language's APIs, which it claimed were not covered by the GPL. Now, the judge will have to look at how the APIs were used and if a fair use case applies in this scenario.
Before the trial can get on, pretrial hearings are scheduled for this April, and both Oracle and Google have to prepare damages claims to present to the judge.
According to unfiled Oracle court documents shown to an IDG News reporter, Oracle is seeking $9.3 billion, of which $475 million are actual damages for unauthorized usage of the APIs while $8.8 billion are parts of Google's profits Oracle thinks it's entitled to.
Google says that APIs have a minimal role in Android
Google's answer to this claim was to point out to Oracle that the damages far outweigh the actual impact of the Java APIs used by the Android OS, which represent just a small portion of the millions of lines of code the system works on.
The Oracle damages claim covers all Android versions up to Lollipop. In its original lawsuit, Oracle wanted only $1 billion in damages, but the figure grew as Google released new OS versions and its profits grew, from mobile advertising and the Play store.
Google has the money to pay if it loses. Only last year, the company turned a profit of $4.9 billion. Of course, the company is not looking forward to giving away the profits for two years and will surely provide its own damages claim that's much smaller than what Oracle has been asking.
As a precaution in case it loses the case, Google has been slowly moving under the radar, testing the Dart programming language as an alternative to Java on Android devices, and even announced plans to port the OS to OpenJDK.