Jury Finds Google Innocent of Java Patent Infringement

From DailyTech: A note to Google Inc.'s (GOOG) legal enemies (and there are many) -- Google may seem soft-hearted and overly idealistic in its public persona, but in the court room it has more in common with Jason Statham than frosted pastries and cutesy robots.

Oracle Corp. (ORCL) learned that the hard way in U.S. Federal District Court for the Northern District of California (San Francisco) today when a jury rejected its arguments and found Google innocent [source] in every case of alleged patent infringement.

It took the jury a bit over a week to deliberate and reach a verdict in the patent phase of the case. That same jury already handed a Google a major early win, finding it only violated one of the many copyrights Oracle accused it of, and further was deadlocked on whether Oracle conclusively established the inapplicability of fair use rules. Hence the jury only ruled Google guilty of minor copyright infringement, and could not decide whether that infringement was acceptable under Fair Use law, hence they essentially found no guilt by Google in the copyright infringement portion.

Google's peachy position was only slightly marred by presiding Judge William Alsup's decision that Google also violated copyrights on eight Java test files. Still, all and all Google escaped relatively scott-free from the copyright portion.

Now it has a resounding victory in the patent portion to accompany it. Of the two patents -- U.S. Patent RE38,104 and 6,061,520 -- jurors found that Google did not infringe on a single on of the 8 asserted claims.

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