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Oracle gets its trial date with Google this Halloween

Oracle was granted at least one of its wishes in its patent infringement suit with Google. The two will go to trial this October. However, Google was given a little room to wiggle.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

Oracle was granted at least one of its wishes in its patent infringement suit with Google. The two will go to trial this October. However, Google was given a little room to wiggle.

On Thursday, both legal teams for the Silicon Valley giants continued to present their arguments at the United States Courthouse in San Francisco. However, all they received was a couple of stern lectures from Judge William H. Alsup without any answer to the joint motion filed earlier this week.

However, Alsup did promise an answer about where the proceedings would go next, and that answer is here.

Florian Mueller reports that the trial is still set for this Halloween (Monday, October 31). Before then, Oracle has been instructed to revamp its damages report, which is in serious need of help given that Oracle has failed to specifically cite patent licenses that it argues were infringed upon.

Mueller writes:

Even though Oracle is likely to arrive at a fairly high damages amount in its damages report 2.0, I believe it's an uphill battle now for the primary Java rights holder to derive a multi-billion dollar amount out of this litigation just based on damages. Instead, the profitability of this for Oracle may now depend mostly on the question of whether or not the court grants an injunction, which is increasingly a possibility given what the judge said at a hearing on Thursday. With an injunction, Oracle would have the leverage to negotiate with Google a license deal that could result in a very high per-unit royalty.

That report will be due 35 days before the pre-trial conference.

As for Google, the judge conceded to Google's Daubert motion, which would exclude a damages report and the related testimony of its author before a jury. That's especially helpful to Google as a new email authored by Google's senior VP of mobile Andy Rubin has surfaced talking about doing Java anyway and making enemies along the way.

Nevertheless, it's generally agreed upon that if Google doesn't come up with something astounding quickly, it's going to be in serious trouble.

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