A judge
in charge of the lawsuit between Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) and Google
Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG) has directed the former to pay the Internet search giant $1
million to cover its legal expenses.
In
July, Google had demanded $4 million to cover its court costs, including almost
$3 million towards “fees for
exemplification and the costs of making copies of any materials where the
copies are necessarily obtained for use in the case,” and $1 millionfor “fees
for printed or electronically recorded transcripts necessarily obtained for use
in the case,” and “compensation of the court-appointed expert”.
Judge
William Alsup refused Google’s request for recovery of nearly $3 million of
document related costs. He is reported to have said, “The problem with Google’s e-discovery bill of costs is that many of
[the] item-line descriptions seemingly bill for ‘intellectual effort’ such as
organizing, searching, and analyzing the discovery documents. Most egregious
are attempts to bill costs for ‘conferencing,’ ‘prepare for and participate in
kickoff call,’ and communications with co-workers, other vendors, and clients.
These are non-taxable intellectual efforts.”
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Google
had earlier claimed to have collected case related documents from more than 86
custodians and to have “delivered to its
document vendor over 97 million documents for electronic processing and review”.
It had
all started with Oracle accusing Google of patent infringement by using Java
for building its Android OS. Oracle had got the Java programming language after
buying Sun Microsystems. Attempts at mediation between the two warring
companies were made but failed as their expectations did not match. Google was
willing to pay only a few million dollars in compensation, whereas Oracle
expected to be paid hundreds of millions.
In June
this year, a jury sided with Google and dismissed Oracle’s claim that Google
had used its patents ruling that Java API elements cannot be copyrighted.
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