Judge overturns Oracle's $1.3bn award against SAP

A California judge has rejected a $1.3bn award that a jury offered to Oracle months ago in its corporate theft trial against SAP.

On Thursday, US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton overturned the award in a long-running court battle between the two enterprise software makers. In the suit, Oracle argued that SAP's now-shuttered subsidiary TomorrowNow wrongfully and illegally downloaded millions of Oracle files.

"Rather than providing evidence of SAP's actual use of the copyrighted works and objectively verifiable number of customers lost as a result, Oracle presented evidence of the purported value of the intellectual property as a whole, elicited self-serving testimony from its executives regarding the price they claim they would have demanded in an admittedly fictional negotiation, and proffered the speculative opinion of its damages expert, which was based on little more than guesses about the parties' expectations," Hamilton wrote in the decision.

Hamilton believes the actual damages to Oracle were worth only $272m (£168m).

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Judge rejects Oracle's $1.3 billion award against SAP on ZDNet.com.