"Counterclaims" is defined as the accusations (claims) in a "reverse" second lawsuit tried together with a first lawsuit, where the defendant in the first lawsuit in the accuser (claimant) in the second lawsuit and the accuser in the first lawsuit is the defendant in the second lawsuit.

Google never filed any counterclaims in this case, so there are none (it would be too late to file them after the trial began more than a month ago).

The questions you raise under the headline "counterclaims?" is something else entirely, namely if Oracle knew it would loose, and if they should have filed this case if they knew they would loose.

To your questions I would answer the followng:

1. There were 9 actual copyright violations (the 9 lines copied from Bloch's pre-2004 code in Sun's arrays.java to Bloch's 2007 code in his 2009 variant of Android's TimSort*.java. Plus the 8 file's Noser needlessly decompiled, even though they (like everybody else) had a copy of the original in the src.zip that came with the JDK). None of these are under the DMCA exceptions for web hosts because Google did the violation all by themselves (they were not merely publishing 3rd party postings like they do in Google's search cache). Google has been found guilty and a (small) punishment in the form of a damages payment is expected.
2. The judge has just ruled that the issue of API copyright was not completely settled prior to the order Judge Alsup wrote this week. So legally, Oracle couldn't have known in advance that they would loose on this, but morally it was wrong for Oracle as a software company to attempt to create case law that APIs should be copyrighted, unless they actually wanted to get the good and just ruling they just got.
3. The patent part of this trial is a bad thing solely because Software patents are a bad idea. Other than that principle, I will discuss the patent part next.
4. In the patent part, at least Oracle didn't hide behind a sock puppet in East Texas like the trolls do, but did a proper "practicing inventor suing other practicing entity" lawsuit of the kind that is right and proper for hardware patents. They lost the patent part solely on the traditional patent issue of interpreting the meaning of patent claims and arguing if that meaning covers the slightly different but similar competing product. Much like the "Crank shaft patent" versus "hub and spoke mechanism" issue with James Watt's improved steam engine (The original Steam engine company had the patent on using a crank shaft to turn an up-down cylinder motion into a rotation output, as is still done in car engines, so James Watt's company came up with the slightly different "hub and spoke" mechanism).
5. Then there is the issue of estoppel. Did Sun make so many promises to Google and the world at large that it had effectively given Google a permission they cannot take back by suing Google? I hope they did, but so far they have lost on the issue if Google needed the permission in the first place, so we really don't know, and might never know.

So on the issue if this was a waste of the courts time that should be punished, I might say no, this was a real trial about real issues.

On the issue if Google was so innocent that Oracle should pay the cost of the trial, I think Oracle's win on the 9 small violations and its near miss on the patents barely saves Oracle's face.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

• No counterclaims filed and your real question - Authored by: Steve Martin on Sunday, June 03 2012 @ 07:42 AM EDT
• No counterclaims filed and your real question - Authored by: PJ on Sunday, June 03 2012 @ 11:14 AM EDT