Google and Oracle have been throwing fists at one another in a complicated legal battle over the past six years now, and seems like the next round of this rather prolonged battle is about to start this April.
According to new reports, Oracle is seeking damages worth a whopping $9.3 billion in its latest filing with the court.
The spat between the two companies reached an all-time high back in 2012 when Oracle filed a copyright infringement lawsuit alleging Google had unfairly and unlawfully used Java in the source code of its Android operating system.
In the first round, Google emerged as the winner in the legal fight that went back and forth for almost a year. The decision was later reversed during the appeal, and then in 2015, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Google’s case after an intervention by the White House. However, the apex court referred the case to the lower courts for a complete retrial.
In this new round of litigation, the lower court judge has been specifically instructed by the Supreme Court to oversee the trial based on the fair usage of Java APIs, and not as a copyright infringement dispute.
Of the $9.3 billion Oracle is seeking in damage, only $475 million are actual damages owing to the alleged unauthorized use of the APIs, whereas the rest of the $8.89 billion are parts of the profit Google harvested through the Android ecosystem that Oracle believes, it is entitled to. Here’s a copy of the analysis [PDF] of the total evaluation carried out by one of Oracle’s expert witnesses, James Malackowsk
The retrial is scheduled to commence from April 27, 2016.