Judge Alsup knows how to program and instructs Oracle attorney

The Groklaw website publishes a text translation of the Oracle court hearings against Google, where we are talking about damages of $ 150,000 for the theft of the rangeCheck and test files for Android. There are interesting points in the discussion. For example, yesterday Judge Alsup, who is leading the case, entered into a bit of a skirmish with attorney David Boys, who represents the interests of Oracle: see the record of the conversation .

Oracle : The question is not how big the damage is. The question is whether it is possible to close eyes to the commercial advantage of the violator on the basis that the volume of violations is small.

In addition, it is not clear to me that a comparison of nine lines of code and 15 million is fair, because 10 million of them are the Linux kernel. But still, nine lines is a small percentage. The test files are much larger, but they are not present, at least in the current version of Android.

But both of them made Google profit by speeding up the development time for Android. The speed of development for Android was a critical factor; we have already demonstrated this before, and we will further illustrate this fact. They wanted faster, faster, faster. This code copying allowed them to use less resources and speed up development. Suppose they accelerated the development by two days. They now earn $ 3 million per day, activating 700 thousand or 800 thousand phones. [According to Google estimates, they earn from $ 8 to $ 10 on each device]. If you just get acceleration for two days, then it’s six or seven million dollars, and this amount does not follow directly from the value of the [stolen] code itself.
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They [Google] want to present the situation in such a way that if something is small, then the offender does not make a profit. Yes, someone else could write this code, but how long would it take for him?
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Judge Alsup : I didn’t know anything about Java before [parsing] this problem. But I used to, and now I’m doing a lot of programming in other languages. I wrote code snippets like rangeCheck hundreds of times before. I could do it, you could do it. In other words, you can copy it at the same speed as writing on your own. It was an accident. In no case can not say that it has accelerated their entry into the market. You are one of the best lawyers in America, how can you even make such arguments?

Oracle : I want to return to the rangeCheck function.

Judge : rangeCheck! Yes, it only checks that the input numbers belong to a range, and generates something like an exception. That witness said that even a schoolboy can write this.

We are talking about damages for the theft of nine lines of the rangeCheck function. The Oracle company demands for them $ 150 thousand of compensation. There is a suspicion that Oracle is trying to create a precedent in order to approve the "rate" for a line of code.