Oracle has started its appeal process on the ruling following its court case loss against Google pertaining to its Java patent case over Android allegedly infringing on its patents and copyrights.
As itpreviously promised, Oracle has filed an appeal of the US District Court ruling in its case against Google, which saw Judge William Alsup rule that that the structure of the former's Java APIs were not copyrightable. Obviously, Oracle weren't best pleased, so imagine how it felt when it was awarded $0 and had to pay $4 million for the search engine giant's legal expenses.
What's more, even if Oracle did win the court case, the judge stressed that it'd only deserve around $35 million at most, which is a considerably distant amount from the firms' initial claim of $6 billion in damages.
"By contrast, Oracle is two steps away from winning by far and away the most important part of the case: the API copyright liability part. In order to prevail on the API copyright liability part, Java API copyrightability is an issue on which Oracle absolutely must prevail at the Federal Circuit or, possibly, at the Supreme Court if the highest court agrees to look at this matter (if Oracle wins at the Federal Circuit, Google will appeal to the Supreme Court, and vice versa, and the issue might be important enough for the Supreme Court to grant certiorari)," explained FOSS Patents.
"There's no single potentially game-changing issue like Java API copyrightability in Apple v. Samsung. And even the 10 most important items on which Samsung needs to prevail are different from the API copyrightability question in terms of raising issues of a more factual than legal nature. The jury will only be overruled if it found on a given item what no reasonable jury could find. A judge doesn't get the same level of deference, especially not if an issue is more legal than factual, or purely legal."
