Oracle Corporation is asking the courts to re-instate the $1.3 Billion copyright infringement verdict it won against SAP. When the verdict from a jury came down, the valuation was based on a hypothetical estimate of the potential licensing costs that SAP would have to pay for those rights.
The US Circuit court judge Susan Graber stated that Revenue estimates don’t “suggest anything about what the license might have cost,” “Even if it was objective, my concern is that it’s evidence of something else.” They lowered the jury verdict to a mere $272 Million when compared to the previous amount. SAP and Oracle do have a stipulated agreement, SAP will be paying at least $306 Million to Oracle for the settlement and attorney fees, no matter what happens in this verdict re-instatement case.
In court papers, Oracle argues that it is entitled to the jury’s verdict because that’s what SAP would have paid in licensing fees. SAP lawyers counter that the trial court judge got it right in reducing the verdict, ruling that Oracle would never have licensed its software to a direct competitor.
It’s a matter of “he said, she said” like with most cases. A $1 Billion dollar difference is a pretty lofty amount, even if a company like Oracle has a market cap of about $185 Billion, a billion dollars is still a billion dollars.
