Oracle withdraws patent claim and demands less compensation

With a letter to the United States District Court, Northern District of California, Oracle has withdrawn the assertion of claim 14 of its patent number 6192476 in its complaint against Google and reduced the number of patents in the case down to five. The case now only revolves around 14 claims (as well as 11 "mirrored" claims) contained in those five patents that, Oracle says, are being violated by Google's Android mobile operating system. "Mirroring" a claim extends a pure "method" to include combinations with a device ("apparatus") or machine-readable medium.

The complaint filed in August 2010 originally involved seven patents and a total of 132 claims. After examining the claims, the US Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) only upheld the claims in patent number 6061520. Patent number 6192476, which has now been withdrawn from the complaint, had already been finally rejected by the USPTO. Oracle had until today to have raised an objection against this decision. Patent number RE38104 is still being examined, but all other patents listed in the complaint have now been invalidated by the USPTO. However, none of these decisions is final.

Google has responded to Oracle's third expert report on the alleged damages incurred. Through the response it became known that, in his final attempt for the time being, Oracle's appointed expert, Iain Cockburn, arrived at a significantly lower amount than in previous reports. The report itself has not been published yet; however, Google's response indicates that Cockburn has now calculated that the damage amounts to between $129 million and $169 million. Oracle's previous claim was for $2.6 billion. The judge, William Alsup, had called this amount "stratospheric" and ordered the submission of a new report.

(djwm)