In yet another allegation, Oracle has accused Google of causing its revenue to plummet by stealing its copyrighted software to enter into the smart phone market. Oracle co-chief executive Safra Catz told jurors on Tuesday that the company’s longtime customers have dramatically reduced the amount of licensing revenue they paid to use Oracle products after Google stole the alleged software. The trial is taking place at a Federal Court in San Francisco where Oracle Corp has claimed that Google’s smart phone operating system – Android has violated the copyrights on parts of Java, which is a development platform owned by Oracle.
According to the Google representatives present in the trial, the company (Google) should be able to use Java without paying a fee to Oracle under the fair use provision of copyright law. The jury in the previous trial was deadlocked about the issue back in 2012. If the current jury rules against Google, the company is set to lose USD $ 9 Billion, that Oracle has sought for damages. This seems to be a matter of grave concern for Google at the moment, especially with the Europe Anti Trust fine of 3.4 Billion Euros that it has to face.
This case has been closely followed by software developers around the world as they fear that if Oracle wins, the world can witness a spurt of many other software copyright lawsuits. Catz told the court on Tuesday that earlier manufacturers paid a licensing revenue to Oracle for using Java in their cellular devices. Now, with Google distributing Android free of cost to such manufacturers, the traditional licensing revenue itself is drastically undercut. According to Catz, Amazon had traditionally used Java as a developing platform for its Kindle, but switched to Android while developing Kindle Fire. Oracle had to offer a 97.5 percent discount to entice Amazon to switch back to Java.
