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."
WTF (Score:1)
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: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:5, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Don't blame it on the lawyers not having common sense -- blame on it them having an abundance of common sense when it comes to exploiting loopholes to protect their clients. I once worked for a company that was shutting down and the lead investor wanted the source code he "owned". My boss and the corporate attorney (who were interested in resurrecting the company) wanted to give him everything he was owed without giving him what he really "wanted", so they had me send them the complete source code history out of CVS in printed form (yes, before the days of SVN and Git) - this was thousands of pages of nearly unusable source code since rewriting the whole thing was probably less work that transcribing it from printouts.
In the end everyone was happy, my boss got his company back, and the lead investor eventually got a nice return on his investment.
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I bet that that was on purpose. Let's send them as much as possible so they have to work for days/weeks/months to find what they actually asked for inside that mess.
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I once sent a minitab worksheet (or whatever they're called) to the printer instead of invoking some command and sending the output from that. The thing did everything short of catching fire before someone killed it.
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.
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So, what happened? (Score:2)
Well? :)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WTF (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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lim x--> inf of x/x is "infinity/infinity" and evaluates to 1.
lim x--> inf of e^x/x is also "infinity/infinity" but evaluates to infinity.
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.
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The word you're looking for is loses not looses.
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.
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Theres just one problem there. The legal system hasn't caught up with the tech and since documents need to be independently verifiable as well as unchanging, print is still the only reliable format.
So we have A) The law hasn't really caught up to the use of electronic documents and B) the tech doesn't exist that would ALLOW the law to catch up. Not that it would take much to create something but its a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just totally false.
Print is trivially forge-able. Literally, children can do it! Haven't you ever heard of some snotty kid altering their grade report so they wouldn't get punished by their parents?
Meanwhile, a digital signature can be made so robust that nothing short of revolutionary new mathematics could be used to alter the data in any way.
On top of that, there are entirely new kinds of things that can be done with digital data, that's just impossible with print.
For example, escrow: It would be possible for a defendant to collect everything, and I mean *everything* that they have, encrypt and sign the data, and then hand it over. This ensures that the prosecution has a snapshot available at a point in time, before the defendant has had time to create forgeries. Then, based on the Judge's rulings, sections of the data can be unlocked and verified by providing the private keys for those sections at a later point. The prosecution, or the Judge, or whoever, can hold the data in escrow, without the defendant having to disclose anything unless required. However, no matter how long the legal process takes, the defendant won't have weeks or months to alter the originals, because they already handed over a snapshot at the very beginning.
Digital is not just "not inferior" to print, it's vastly superior in every way. It's cheaper to store, cheaper to copy, and trivial to search. I can be digitally signed, encrypted, and timestamped. None of that is possible with print.
I bet many people in the legal profession are smart enough to understand this. I bet that all of those in that subset are also smart enough to realize that they can continue to charge their exorbitant fees if they keep using antiquated dead-tree methods instead of modernizing.
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You have no fucking idea what you are talking about in regards to digital storage vs law needs.
The point of it is to be UNCHANGEABLE once entered into evidence AND verifiable as not having been changed BEFORE being entered into evidence. What you claim about paper being forge-able is trivially ruled out by a cursory forensics analysis. More sophisticated attempts would require a more sophisticated analysis but would be found.
Electronics can NEVER guarantee that. You can even hide programs inside the files t
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You really need to read up on digital signatures [wikipedia.org]! Archival formats too. I'm not talking about computer programs, I'm talking about data. Just about anything that would be relevant to a court case could be easily converted into something like PDF/A [wikipedia.org]. While you're at it, keep going and read about trusted timestamping [wikipedia.org] as well before you accuse others of ignorance.
You're thinking of a digital copy as a "fancy" paper copy, and hence you're confusing the pure digital data (an abstract mathematical description of s
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You still don't understand.
You are inherently trusting the initial seeder. If the initial seeder put up blocks that are infected, then you get infected. The initial source is exactly who the courts very often CANNOT trust and still have a fair and just legal system.
I am aware of ALL of the technologies that you are describing but NONE of them counteract the one problem that is stopping it. You can digitally sign, encrypt and time stamp your fucking heart off. All of it is either irrelevant or exploitable. T
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Sigh, logical fail in third paragraph, everything until "The trigger" should be ignored. I'll fix it later.
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You are already trusting the initial seeder. In your example, the court asks Company A to hand over its documents. Company A is the initial seeder. Just because the docs are printed doesn't make them any less susceptible to being altered before they are handed over.
Now, once they are handed over, your argument says that it would be better to have forensic verification done on them at each stage when they are used to verify they haven't been altered? Seriously?
I agree w/ the grandparent, math is much har
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You really want to trust a government that can't even keep its own damaging secrets secure with the security of evidence?
Besides that a cursory forensic analysis is stupidly easy and would like involve automated software checking of individual pages against original electronic copies. Its called multi-layer authentication that includes a physical component. What the GP is saying is we should do away with paper altogether, which we should definitely not.
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have you ever used a computer? seriously, here is a 1000 page paper manuscript and a 1000 page text file. find the misspelling... that is basically what we are talking about.
you rail against trusting the gov't but the electronic copy is infinitely more trustable b/c you can show without a shadow of a doubt, whether the document has been modified since delivery. Paper will not _ever_ be able to show you the same thing.
I do like multi layer ( usually called defense in depth, or did the buzz word move on)
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You neglect to include the cost of the actual copy/scan/print, and not just storage. Plus depending on the documents, there may have been fees to get access to them in the first place. ( for similar reasons ). Storage is NOT the biggest cost.
There are humans doing this and they like to eat too.
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You mean like Lars Ulrich did with printouts of napster usernames and filenames?
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2.9 million in copying?
I think I want to die.
97M pages @ $2.9M = 3 cents/page. Pretty reasonable since "copying and organizing" presumably includes labor.
I want to be paid 3 cents per GREPped page
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Deal. But if you expose any material not related to the case through improper redacting you will be held liable for any losses incurred over a 10 year span.
They should have just told them... (Score:3)
...To Google it.
yeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh.
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That's right about the cost per page of a pretty decent personal printer. I know, only a fool would bother printing 97M pages for a court case. But maybe that's just Google's out-of-season April Fool's Joke for Oracle.
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It is apparent that you have never hired a lawyer.
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It is apparent that you have never hired a lawyer.
These guys track and bill for every individual copy, fax and scan. It's pretty retarded hooking this shit up to the copier also(the counter machine), but they're the only ones that use them. They also are still in love with faxing things, they live in the 70's.
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Probably for the same reason doctors use fax machines for sending prescriptions and patient data around but not email.
Faxes have a legal presumption of security, and intercepting them (specifically!) is a crime with fairly stiff penalties... whereas sending something around by unencrypted email means you're liable if it leaks.
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Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
US$ 2.9 million in copying? That's only like 3 or 4 MP3's.
I hope Google gets that $4mil (Score:4, Interesting)
Because it's the principle that matters!
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Well, for starters I'm sure that $4m is actually a small fraction of their actual legal costs.
In some cases, the losing side will just cover the administrative costs - it's possible that the summary is wrong and this is the case here.
Otherwise, Google has decided to super low ball their estimate for some reason.
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The summary is wrong.
What is being covered is stuff like copying documents, having to pay to produce three different damages reports since Oracle couldn't be bothered to follow the Judge's instructions on the damages report the first two times (actually, they didn't follow them ANY of the times, but the Judge gave up after three tries)....
A cheaper alternative (Score:5, Funny)
"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.""
Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.
Re:A cheaper alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Yea, but the justice system demands stuff to be written on dead trees...
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Yes, software patents accelerate climate change.
Petition presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to abolish them on environmental grounds? :)
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They did. It would have been a lot more to search 97 million documents by hand.
Re:A cheaper alternative (Score:4, Funny)
They did. It would have been a lot more to search 97 million documents by hand.
If only Google had access to technology for indexing and searching vast amounts of documents and displaying the results in, say, a Web browser.
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They did. It would have been a lot more to search 97 million documents by pigeons
FTFY
Re:A cheaper alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.""
Couldn't they have just put them on some sort of server and used some kind to search software to allow access.
I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)
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for _processing_ what should be submitted and processing how it's going to be used as evidence however..
besides, submitting a hd should have been enough. it's enough to use as evidence against people in criminal cases so why the fuck not here?
Re:A cheaper alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Nevermind that! I think I just saw a RIAA lawyer raise his head from a prey, and prick up his ears...
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Perhaps, but they still have to read all those documents to ensure that they're:
1. Everything they were ordered by the court to produce.
2. Not more than the court ordered them to produce.
3. Accurate, official versions, etc.
4. Not out-of-context.
It isn't like they're going to just point their search engine at their entire internal network and give Oracle access to it to go fishing.
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Well, try to come up with a search query line that does something like this: "all documents about Java but only those that relate to this case and do not reveal company secrets that are not relavant to the case".
Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica [arstechnica.com] Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
Forensic data analysis is a specialized niche, not something you want to throw an intern at.
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You have a rather wide eyed take on Google's abilities. Hint: if you have a PhD and you're that smart, you're more than smart enough to avoid being assigned such a menial task.
Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
What is a bit surprising, to me, is that according to Arstechnica [arstechnica.com] Google had an external consulting firm handle part of the document search and digitization. I would have thought that Google knew a thing or two about that kind of thing...
Not that surprising. I haven't gone through the PACER docket for this case to check, but I'd be extremely surprised if a stipulated protective order wasn't in place, one that permitted document production to be designated 'Attorney's Eyes Only' for commercially sensitive (etc.) documents. Google themselves wouldn't be able to handle the search and digitization of any such material; their lawyers would have had to have outsourced that (or done it internally, much more expensive)...
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97 million documents? (Score:5, Interesting)
Forget Google - if even 1 percent of those 97 million documents actually needed to be printed out for this case then the entire freaking planet should sue Oracle and make them plant a new rainforest
Re:97 million documents? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. They vary in their conclusions from about 8,000 sheets up to 100,000, mostly because they use different trees to start with. Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre of rainforest. I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.
We can then derive other fanciful metrics, like how many species are being destroyed in the process (as many Amazonian plants and animals have extremely small habitats.)
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Re:97 million documents? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, all paper is made from either recycled sources, or managed plantations. All lumber should be as well, but there are frequent allegations to the contrary.
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There are various calculations on the Internet for how much paper you can get from a tree. ... I propose we start measuring large proceedings in square kilometres of northern Amazon, just to emphasize how drastic they are.
Wait, why are you inventing a new system? Just use the established unit of measure everyone is already familiar with: Libraries of Congress.
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Given that some areas of the Amazon have 30,000 trees per square kilometre, or at least 240,000,000 pages, this court case used less than half a square kilometre
How many pages are you assuming per document?
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then they'll sue for the legal fees needed to recover the $4 mil, then for the fees for that latter action, etc.
As Zeno of Elea would've pointed out, there is no end to money that Oracle will have to pay Google.
Actually, this is an application (usually made to a clerk) to tax costs, it doesn't include legal fees (which are usually discretionary, if available to the prevailing party at all, and usually only awarded in "exceptional" cases).
Google needs the money (Score:4, Funny)
Google needs the money, otherwise Larry might be forced to switch one of the campus sushi bars over to fried chicken.
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Google needs the money, otherwise Larry might be forced to switch one of the campus sushi bars over to fried chicken.
LMFAO! That one's good! Fried Chicken is about what our economy is worth anyways.
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Dammit, now you're tempting me to disloyalty; a fried chicken themed cafe sounds great.
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Software Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Software Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
Nah; assorted historians have pointed out that the primary function of patent law has always been to block manufacturing and development. Really, the only thing you can do with a patent is deny others the legal right to build anything based on whatever your patent covers. In theory, you can also collect royalties from licenses, but this is historically insignificant compared to the use of patents to block whatever competitors are trying to manufacture.
Historians have also pointed out that most patent holders have only rarely profited from owning a patent before the patent runs out. Typically they lose money paying for legal actions to block others' use of the patent. After it expires, however, they tend to profit because they're the experts on it, and can thus produce products based on it sooner than their competitors can.
The idea that patents are for providing income to the inventors is just a bit of legal propaganda to keep people confused enough to prevent improving the patent laws. In the real world, it hardly ever works for the patent holder's benefit. (But lawyers often make lots of money in legal patent battles. ;-)
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Re:Software Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
His sig is particularly ironic in this case.
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It was a typo. He meant "asshatted hysterics".
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You misspelt "I probably read it on Reddit once"
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I know it's not exactly the same and it might not be Google's motive, but I don't like it and I complain when someone is punching me in the face, but when that happens I find it justified to punch them in the face too. In the current climate with all the frivolous patent lawsuits going around, it would be foolish for Google to not amass/acquire a patent portfolio of their own, it's a crazy game and the industry has set the rules - you either play by the rules or you don't play at all unfortunately.
But I do
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I find it fun to point out the hypocrisy of companies that rail against software patents while applying for them at the same time. Google does this ...
As defense
Patents were not meant to protect services but manufacturing ideas.
Interesting.
we are even outsourcing our services now. What will be left?
Well, I think the design of things can be kept. Once you outsource that, you've outsourced it all. Design is the highest job, I think. You can outsource and computerize repetitive tasks, but --- as Apple, for example, has shown --- the design makes all the difference.
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I thought the original intention of patents was really to protect and enhance manufacturing.
The original intent of parents, i.e. not the one patent trolls and their lawyers advertise, was to protect knowledge from being lost/forgotten due to industrial secrecy. The intent was to convert private knowledge into public good in exchange for a limited-time legal protection. The idea was never really to ensure monopoly and especially not income of the inventor, but to prevent inventor from keeping his inventions secret by allowing him to be legally protected for a limited time in exchange for publicly
I know of a perfect place for those 97MM pages (Score:1)
Holy Deforestation Batman! (Score:1)
If google lose, ... (Score:2)
Next time you meet Larry, sing him a song (Score:4, Funny)
# Row, row, row, your boat, /#
A rowboat's all you've got.
Legal fees, legal fees, legal fees, legal fees.
Can't afford a yacht.
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Reasons to boycott Apple (Score:1)
#BoycottApple
And So It’s Come To This: Samsung/Google Forced To Degrade Features In Patent Dispute
> The latest in the ridiculous saga of the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung, which has resulted in Samsung phones and tablets being banned from sale in the US, is that Samsung, with the help of Google, has been pushing out an over-the-air software update to make its phones worse. Yes, the OTA update is designed to take away a feature, in an effort to convince the judge that the phones no longer