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Oracle lawyers prevail in copyright case (No, not that, the other one)

Rimini Street will have to foot $46m legal bill

Oracle has been awarded $46.2m in its copyright battle with Rimini Street.

The Nevada Federal Court awarded the cash [PDF] to cover the legal bills Oracle has racked up in its years-long battle with Rimini – which repackaged and sold support services for Oracle products without a license.

The federal court also put in place a permanent injunction banning Rimini from further illegally regurgitating Oracle documentation and downloads. Rimini claims it changed its practices in 2014 to avoid ripping off Oracle's copyrighted manuals and software.

The $46.2m bill comes on top of a previous $50m damages payout that Oracle won in the initial phase of the copyright case.

Back in 2010, Oracle accused Rimini Street of violating copyrights when the small biz downloaded and provided Oracle database support materials to its own customers without obtaining the proper license from Oracle.

The latest decision permanently bars Rimini Street from further copyright violations and awards the $46.2m to cover the costs of Oracle's legal team and its expert witnesses.

Oracle had asked the court to award $58m, a bill the courts later trimmed down to $46m after adjusting for errors in the accounting. The court noted that Rimini Street's particularly poor legal defense of the case gave Oracle strong grounds to recover its legal fees in the case.

"It was based on a clear misreading of Oracle's software licensing agreements and a conscious disregard for the manner that Rimini used and housed Oracle's copyrighted software programs on its own servers," Oracle said of the defense.

"In fact, Rimini's position was so unreasonable that the court was able, at summary judgment, to determine that Rimini engaged in massive copyright infringement of Oracle's copyrighted works, thereby leaving only a few issues for trial."

A spokesperson for Rimini told us: "The jury found that RSI’s [Rimini Street Inc's] infringement was 'innocent' meaning that RSI did not know and had no reason to know its past practices were infringing. RSI plans to appeal the court’s findings, particularly those which are inconsistent with the jury’s controlling finding that the infringement was 'innocent.'"

Oracle v Google rumbles on

Meanwhile, today in San Francisco, Oracle finds itself back in court against Google in an appeal related to the two companies' Java copyright battle. An Oracle attorney allegedly violated a protection order when she read out loud in court Google's confidential attorneys-eyes-only figures for Android revenues and profit. That information was supposed to be kept under wraps, and Oracle is accused of being in contempt of court by revealing the numbers. ®

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