Had things gone as planned, the lawyers on both sides of Oracle’s mammoth patent and copyright suit against Google over its Android operating system would already be more than two weeks into trial in San Jose federal district court. Oracle counsel David Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner might have already had a chance to interrogate Google founder Larry Page. And Google counsel Robert Van Nest of of Keker & Van Nest could have urged the jury not to award Oracle up to $1.16 billion over Google’s alleged infringement of its Java IP.
Instead, last month Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California delayed the trial until 2012 due to a criminal trial on his docket, leaving the lawyers to continue fighting it out on paper and giving the judge on opportunity to shape the case in a series of orders. On Tuesday, he denied a motion by Google to limit the scope of any damages to the date on which Oracle first made the claim that the Android system infringed its patents. And on Monday, he rejected Google’s bid for a pretrial ruling on whether Oracle’s overall specifications for its Java system are copyrightable.
