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Google has lost its bid to shield an internal email in its battle with Oracle over the Java programing language. U.S. District Judge William Alsup on Thursday rejected Google's claims that the email, written by an engineer, was privileged and confidential.
Oracle sued Google last year, claiming the search engine's Android mobile operating system infringes Java patents and copyrights. Oracle had acquired Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010.
Shortly before Oracle filed the suit, Google software engineer Tim Lindholm drafted an email saying Google needed to negotiate a license for Java. Lindholm had been asked to find alternatives to Java for Android.
"We've been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck," he wrote. "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need."
Google turned the email over to Oracle during discovery, but later asserted it was privileged and shouldn't have been produced.
In August, Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu ruled that "Google has not demonstrated that the Lindholm email falls within the ambit of attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine."
And in his order Thursday, Alsup said Ryu was correct.
"Simply labeling a document as privileged and confidential or sending it to a lawyer does not automatically confer privilege," Alsup wrote.
Officials at Google did not immediately respond to request for comment.
