Oracle might only receive $150,000 in damages from Google

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SAN FRANCISCO – Oracle’s situation in its intellectual property legal battle against Google is looking more bleak by the day.

At one point in time, Oracle was trying to go after Google with the intent to receive up to $6 billion in damages. Slowly that figure has dwindled down to somewhere around $1 billion and then a few hundred million.

Now, it looks like Oracle could end up with just $150,000 — if anything at all given that the threat of a mistrial looms and we’re still in the middle of the second phase of the trial covering patent infringement.

Judge William Alsup warned Oracle at the U.S. District Court of Northern California on Thursday morning that the “most” the plaintiff might end up with is statutory damages over the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method — the only item on the verdict form during phase one of the trial in which the jury found Google’s conceded use was copyright infringement.

“The fact that they have nine lines out of many millions, you have no damage study tied in,” Alsup exclaimed to Oracle.

Although it is up to the jury to determine damages, the maximum limit for statutory damages is $150,000.

Alsup suggested they “might want to find a way to streamline for some dollar amount,” hinting they should try to negotiate a settlement in order to avoid a long third phase of the trial dedicated to determining damages.

Nevertheless, all of this is still to be determined as Google has filed a motion for the copyrights phase of the trial to be declared a mistrial. The judge has not ruled on that issue yet.

Even if Google had to fork over $150,000, it could still be a huge win for the Internet giant considering how much Oracle originally wanted.

In regards to the patents part of the lawsuit — which as Groklaw described as a “roll of the dice for both parties” — Google put up a better offer in April for up to $2.8 million in damages over two patents in question. Furthermore, Google also offered a deal of 0.5 percent from Android revenue for one patent through December 2012 and 0.015 percent on a second patent through April 2018. The catch is that this offer was only a stipulation for damages if (and only if) Oracle prevails on patent infringement.

Oracle reportedly rejected it.

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VMware ESX source code leaked online

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VMware has warned its users after fragments of its ESX virtualisation software source code appeared online.

The leak stems from an attack by a hacker calling himself “Hardcore Charlie”, and claims to have 300MB of VMware’s source code and vast amounts of internal data from other companies.

Documents appeared on image-sharing site Imgur and code sharing site Pastebin, often used by hackers to leak contents of network breaches.

Iain Mulholland, director of VMware’s Security Response Center, said despite the code leak, it “does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers,” and takes the matter of security seriously. The company said it is engaging with “internal and external resources”.

Kaspersky’s Threatpost said that the hacker claims to have hacked China’s National Electronics Import and Export Corp. (CEIEC) in March, which led to other information being leaked. Samples of VMware’s code have already been released, with promises of more CEIEC data in May, after the hacker claimed he was investigating U.S. military activities.

CEIEC denied the claims calling them “totally groundless, highly subjective and defamatory.”

The hack appears to be of a similar nature to how Symantec’s legacy anti-virus source code was leaked after an Indian intelligence service network was hacked, though VMware did not respond to questions at the time of publication.

Over half of datacenters run virtualisation, making virtual infrastructures a prime target for attacks, one analyst said.

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April 20, 2012

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