Oracle, Google on track for trial after deal rejected

AFP FILE PHOTOS

SAN FRANCISCO — Google and Oracle continued legal wrangling on Wednesday in a dimming effort to reach a deal to avoid facing off before jurors in a patent case trial.

The trial remained set to start next month in a San Francisco federal court after Oracle spurned a proposal that Google pay about $3 million in damages and potentially cut the company in for less than a percent of Android revenue.

Northern California-based business software titan Oracle rejected the offer as too low.

“Oracle cannot agree to Google’s proposal that Oracle waive its constitutional right to a jury trial,” Oracle lawyers said in a formal response filed Tuesday to US District Court Judge William Alsup.

“Although there are issues for the Court to decide, there are substantial questions for the jury as well.”

Oracle is accusing Google’s Android software of infringing on Java computer programming language patents held by Oracle stemming from its recent purchase of Java inventor Sun Microsystems.

Google has denied the patent infringement claims and said it believes mobile phone makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.

Google has maintained that Sun, before it was acquired by Oracle, had declared that Java would be open-source, allowing any software developer to use it, and released some of its source code in 2006 and 2007.

Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun, a one-time Silicon Valley star, in January of 2010 and subsequently filed suit against Google.

Google-backed Android software is used in an array of devices that have been gaining ground in the hotly competitive global smartphone and tablet markets.