After Android Trial, Google Demands $4M From Oracle

MikeatWired writes "Google is seeking $4 million from Oracle to cover the costs it incurred during this spring's epic legal battle over the Android mobile operating system, reports Caleb Garling. In a brief filed in federal court on Thursday night, Google lead counsel Robert Van Nest argued that Oracle is required to pay his company's legal costs because judge and jury ruled in favor of Google on almost every issue during the six-week trial. 'Google prevailed on a substantial part of the litigation,' read Google's brief. '[Oracle] recovered none of the relief it sought in this litigation. Accordingly, Google is the prevailing party and is entitled to recover costs.' Google has not publicly revealed an itemized list of its expenses, but the total bill included $2.9 million spent copying and organizing documents. According to the brief, the company juggled a mind-boggled 97 million documents during the case."

Re:A cheaper alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, but the justice system demands stuff to be written on dead trees...

Re:WTF

[TreyGeek]

This and a comment a few notches below reminds me of a story an old professor at my university told in an ethics class. He was an expert witness at trial where a state inspector was run over by a 'modern' paving machine. The defense lawyers requested a copy of the source code for the firmware in the machine. They came into the office one day to find on their fax machine pages and pages of printouts of the crap produced from opening the executable in Word. The executable, not the source code! Bottom line, when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.

Re:WTF

[adamchou]

when it comes to lawyers do not assume they have an ounce of common sense and depend upon them to charge you for their own mistakes.

don't always assume that what they're doing is out of ignorance.

a friend of mine works for a boutique patent firm suing a larger company for violating their patent. when they asked for the source to a program that produces a ~30 line output, the larger company sent 10 gigs of source code, historic source code, accompanying documents, and other crap and told them to sift through it to find it. on top of that, they only had a month or so to go through all of it.

my point is, sometimes, its a stall tactic to drive up costs and or to just add unnecessary complications for the other side

Re:WTF

[drkstr1]

1.

Re:WTF

[Nemyst]

I know this was supposed to be funny, but the "Informative" mod is depressing.

Infinity/Infinity is undefined, just like 0/0 and Infinity/0.