Oracle Must Pay Google $1,130,350 in Costs
groklaw.net
groklaw.net
From time to time, some small troll wins a few hundred million from Microsoft or whatever, but the real story here is that if you don't have ten million dollars to buy into the game, you can't play. It's almost as if the odd "win" by a bit player is a PR stunt to convince congress that the current system is an incentive for entrepreneurs and dreamers to invent new things.
But it's all bullshit. It's a rigged game.
This is one of the main reasons I think that all money spent on lawyers should go into an account that both sides get to draw upon equally to pay legal expenses. You simply cannot have a system capable of meting out justice if money can skew "justice" in your favor.
The two questions which immediately come to mind:
1. How to bell the cat (how does one actually get this enacted)?
2. What could possibly go wrong?
Easy to imagine how this could be abused. Imagine that I have a brother who's a lawyer. I bring a frivolous lawsuit against Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc. knowing that they'll dump a fair amount of money into the account. My brother bills me for legal services, taking roughly half the money from the account. I lose the lawsuit but my brother and I split the money.
I'll give you another: there are situations in which pro-bono services may be provided to one party in a suit. Often to increase the equity of a situation, but not in all cases. Should the pro-bono provider be on the hook for the opposing parties reciprocal costs, and how should the PB provider's services be valued?
The SCO v. IBM suit is another in which I could see IBM's legal costs (very high, I'm sure, though I've seen no figures or estimates given) but in which SCO being granted pooled fees would be a miscarriage of justice.
Why is being good so difficult?
Power player A meets power player B, they discuss what they hope to do in the near future - plans and interests. Perhaps they will have matters of mutual interest - thats great.
Then they seperately take action, happy to know what positions and interests the other players in the game have.
Apple and Oracle were both threatened by Android. No-one needed egging on, no-one needed secret deals. They were open and above board about wanting to screw over Larry and Sergey. :-)
I don't think an article mentioning the google bloggers ever reached >10 points, at least by my googling.
I appreciate that it probably wasn't yourself who chose to include the term 'shill' in the Google document name, but your referring to 'the Google bloggers' is a bit misleading. To quote from Google's disclosure:
"Neither Google nor its counsel has paid an author, journalist, commentator, or blogger to report or comment on any issues in this case. And neither Google nor its counsel have been involved in any quid pro quo in exchange for coverage or articles about the issues in this case."
Contrast this to Oracle's retaining Florian Mueller as a paid consultant when he was backing their case on his blog.
(Edit: Clarified Oracle/Mueller relationship)
Nevertheless, I'll edit my comment to clarify.
Mueller was directly hired and paid by Oracle. Whether or not he was specifically hired to comment on the case or not, that's quite a different kettle of fish to simply belonging to the same organization that Oracle may have contributed to.
Besides, it's not clear what "consulting" he has done for Oracle, but his expertise is patent law...
His expertise is in lobbying.
Oracle's statement: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraclevGoogle-1236.pdf
$1M / $30B = 0.0000333
That's the equivalent of having $300 in your pocket and someone demanding 1 penny.
They won, the judge knows they won, but they still had to do the road running and the no sex for a month before the match, so its a sunk cost. Lots of sex after the match does not make up for the month before.
cost awards indicate not only did the jury agree with you, but your case was so strong the other side should be punished for bringing it. Compare to cads where costs of a dollar are awarded.
As for sex, forswearing sex before a sporting match is / was a common means of getting teams away from disruptive or chaotic marriages by wiley coaches, and could be seen as a sunk cost in winning the match. Even if you were awarded restitution after the match the costs were sunk so it does not matter if costs are awarded or not (see the too well funded to care above)