After Android Trial, Google Demands $4M From Oracle 119
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:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
2.9 million in copying?
I think I want to die.
97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Forensic data analysis is a specialized niche, not something you want to throw an intern at.
Software Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you meant $2.7M not $97M (I expect a typo) it was 97M documents, which could have each contained X pages.
There's more than just drag and drop the document folder - that probably included the labour of all the finding/sorting/sifting. I also know little to nothing about the legal system they were operating in, but it might be necessary to provide printed copies of these document - that would really start to add up. $2.7M is probably fair if that is the case.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much.
I assume you mean $2.9 million?
Well, Oracle lost.
it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man!
No, this should be the punishment for a company that looses. Do you think that a company should be able to come up to you and request MILLIONS of documents? Do you think a company should come up to you send you legal request after legal request for documents? So what if fits on $50 hard drive? It's the labor to go through the 20 million pages. You don't want to be giving out the wrong pages that have something valuable on it not related that Oracle could steal. If the "Common Man" could read a PAGE PER SECOND every second of every day and NEVER EVER SLEEP it would take him 231 days to go through all that.
Doesn't seem like any company should just be able to to do this without repercussion to me. That would make justice impossible for the common man.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
97M pages at a generous 100kB per page is just under 10 TB, which costs about $1000 to store. Let be generous again, and multiply the cost of raw disk capacity by a factor of 100 to account for redundancy, hosting, rack space, and bandwidth... Nope, still only $100,000!
So, yeah, $97M is a bit much. The only way I can think to account for such a ludicrously high cost would be if they used an archaic manual technology, like making crude pigment-based marks on dead trees! But that would be ludicrous, it would make justice impossible to afford for the common man! Such a system wouldn't be allowed in a modern society, right?
yYou've ignored that they are asking for $2.9M, not $97M.
Now, looking at the $2.9M figure, you're ignoring the labor costs -- you're paying someone to review and organize the docs (and either copy them or categorize them into some document management system). Assuming you're paying someone who actually knows something about software or the case, i think $30/hour is reasonable. You can pay $20/hour for an administrative assistant to a temp agency.
If they can review a document and sort it appropriately in 10 seconds, that's 360 documents/hour. $30/hour / 360 docs/hour = 8.3 cents/document. Since many documents (i.e. source code files) are probably multiple pages long, 3 cents/document sounds reasonable. You'd probably pay an agency around 10 cents/page to scan a document. Plus 2 or 3 cents for printed docs.
Re:Software Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
His sig is particularly ironic in this case.