The chips are flying in Oracle’s copyright damages battle with the German software maker SAP over material that a former SAP subsidiary downloaded from Oracle’s web site. And as an action-packed first week of trial in Oakland federal district court ends, it’s not clear where they’ll fall.
In Oracle’s opening argument last week, Geoffrey Howard of Bingham McCutchen told jurors that SAP should pay whatever licensing fee it would have negotiated with Oracle for the software downloaded by TomorrowNow. Oracle has pegged that number to be at least $2 billion. (In fact, on Thursday, former Oracle president Charles Phillips testified the license fee should actually be $5 billion.)
