Google outlines legal strategy in Oracle expert challenge
BVLaw Alert has blogged a couple of times about Oracle America, Inc. v. Google Inc., on the Java code allegedly found in Android software and on Google strategy. Oracle hired Boston University professor Iain Cockburn—the extensively published academic—to calculate and prove the alleged damages.
Our reading of Google’s pre-Daubert challenge filing indicates that they will attack his credentials. For one, Cockburn lacks valuation credentials: no ASA, ABV, CFA, CVA, AVA, etc. We haven’t done the math, but a quick review of the cases in BVLaw shows courts tend to trust trained valuators, analysts bound by uniform standards and required to earn continuing education credits to maintain their status. He’s not in BVR’s Expert Directory.Though he is well-published, few articles are related to damages theory.
Professor Cockburn has argued in the damages report that Oracle is entitled to 50% of Google’s ad revenues on the Android mobile platform. If the credentials attack isn’t enough, they’ll also stress that Cockburn:
- Fails to tie the royalty rate to the infringement issue and ignores new “total market” law as defined in Uniloc and Lucent;
- Fails to provide any meaningful analysis of the 15 Goergia Pacific factors critical in determining a reasonable royalty;
- Includes Oracle’s “lost profits and opportunities” in his royalty base, in a realization Oracle could not meet the “recovery of lost profits” standard;
- Imputes in his royalty base theoretical downstream harm to a wholly different Oracle product;
- Uses improper methodology to develop an unprecedented royalty rate;
- Confuses patents and copyrights;
- Asserts that a finding of infringement of a single claim of a single patent should result in a finding of infringement for all claims;
- Dismisses evidentiary value of current Java licenses, previous Oracle/Google negotiations, and market value of (and Oracle’s own valuation of) the Java platform.