Now that most of the moves are discounted, that seems to leave
3C.
3. In the event that no portion of Oracle’s SSO Claim is
submitted to a future jury for an assessment and award of monetary relief,
then:
A. The parties waive their right to a jury trial on the issue of
monetary relief if any, for infringement arising as a result of the Copied
Materials;
B. Oracle waives any claim for actual damages or profits
for such infringement; and
C. The Court will set an amount of
statutory damages for such infringement in accordance with 17 U.S.C. §
504(c).
17 U.S.C. § 504:
(c) Statutory Damages.—
(1) Except as provided by clause (2) of this subsection, the copyright
owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover,
instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all
infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which
any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more
infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750
or more than $30,000 as the court considers just. For the purposes of this
subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one
work.
(2) In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of
proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the
court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of
not more than $150,000. In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of
proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no
reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright,
the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum
of not less than $200.
The only point to make is that we will
not know that the SSO issue will not be submitted to a future jury until
the possibility of remand to a jury on appeal is over. My guess is that the
issue of the amount of damages will be covered in the case management
conference; or should I stick to my paper-round, day job?
RAS drew our
attention to the judge's statement:In the findings, the phrase “this
order finds . . .” is occasionally used to emphasize a point. The absence of
this phrase, however, does not mean (and should not be construed to mean) that a
statement is not a finding. All declarative fact statements set forth in the
order are factual findings.
So the following were statements of
fact found by the judge and given in his order.
These were his
memorable statements about rangeCheck:Oracle has made much of nine
lines of code that crept into both Android and Java. This circumstance is so
innocuous and overblown by Oracle that the actual facts, as found herein by the
judge, will be set forth below for the benefit of the court of
appeals.
While working at Sun, Dr. Bloch wrote a nine-line code for a
function called “rangeCheck,”... Around 2007, Dr. Bloch wrote the files,
“Timsort.java” and “ComparableTimsort,” both of which included the same
rangeCheck function he wrote while at Sun. He wrote the Timsort files in his own
spare time and not as part of any Google project... Dr. Bloch did, in fact,
contribute his Timsort file to OpenJDK and Sun included Timsort as part of its
Java J2SE 5.0 release... While working on the Android team, Dr. Bloch also
contributed Timsort and ComparableTimsort to the Android platform. Thus, the
nine-line rangeCheck function was copied into Google’s Android. This was how the
infringement happened to occur. When discovered, the rangeCheck lines were taken
out of the then-current version of Android over a year ago.
Since
'the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe
that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright', that it was
donated and openly used by Oracle in OpenJDK and Java J2SE 5.0 and that the
copying was innocuous and not at all damaging to Oracle, I think that the judge
will use his discretion and set the statutory damages at
$200.
But, what about the eight decompiled files? Judge Alsup
reversed the jury decision and found that the copying of the eight files was not
de minimus. This is what he said in Note 1.:After the jury verdict,
the Court granted Oracle's Rule 50 motion for judgment as a matter of law of
infringement of eight decompiled computer files, which were literally copied.
Google admitted to copying eight computer files by decompiling the bytecode from
eight Java files into source code and then copying the source code. These files
were not proven to have ever been part of Android.
Here is the
relevant part of Oracle's Amended Complaint:39.
Google’s Android
infringes Oracle America’s copyrights in the Java platform, and
Google infringes
Oracle’s exclusive rights under copyright by reproducing and
distributing
Android and inducing others to reproduce and distribute Android or
the code contained within it.
My reading of that is that the eight
files were inadvertently copied by Google, but were not proven to be part of
Android and were not, therefore, covered by the complaint made by Oracle. They
are not part of the case!
So, there we have it. The total damages are
$200.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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