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| Authored by: Tkilgore on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 05:33 PM EDT |
> he knows this is going to appeal whatever happens.
> If the appeal is successful then there won't need to be a
trial on the infringement. He's being a good citizen and
saving tax dollars.
The problem with that is, in the interest of "judicial economy" the
jury has been ordered, in the form of the jury instructions, to determine that
Google has infringed upon the copyright of Sun/Oracle.
-- The jury has been told that Google needed to have a license in writing from
Sun, which everyone agrees that it did not have.
-- The jury has been told that Google needed to have the license in writing from
Sun even though Google used Apache Harmony as its source instead of Sun. Why was
the jury told that? Is it true? I do not know, but Google obviously did not
think so, and neither did Sun back in the day.
-- The jury has been told that Google needed the license in writing from Sun
even though Apache Harmony did not need any license from Sun in order to release
what it released under an open source license. Or did Oracle say that the next
thing which will happen is that Apache will be sued too? If so, I missed that.
Provided that the jury follows these restrictive instructions, it appears to me
that there is only one way which the jury can act. By these instructions, the
jury is ordered to find massive copyright violation by Google and has been
denied the opportunity to consider the actual facts.
I am not necessarily taking one side or the other in the case by saying these
things. I am merely pointing out that the jury verdict will be a fairy-tale
verdict which applies only in a fairy-tale world when the jury verdict must lie
within these prescribed guidelines. If it really does stay within the extreme
constraints imposed in the instructions, the jury verdict will necessarily be
nonsensical because the permitted factors which go into it are nonsensical.
It appears to me that the outcome of this trial is an inevitable descent into
irrationality. I do not see how that the judge can pull it back out again by
reserving some parts of the decision for himself after he said that the jury can
not even consider those aspects of the case and is not entitled to have an
opinion about them.
This reminds me of a comment made by a juror after the infamous Chicago Seven
trial years ago. The juror said afterwards when interviewed by the press that
the defendants were "guilty as charged by the judge." Meaning that the
judge had given a charge to the jury which did not permit the jury to do
anything other than to find the defendants guilty.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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