“Shortly before the holiday weekened, Judge William Alsup, the federal judge presiding over Oracle’s patent and copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, communicated his inclination to order ‘the top executive officers’ of Oracle and Google to participate in a mediation effort, spending one or two full days in court before a Magistrate Judge,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “The court can’t force them to settle on any particular terms, but the court may have the authority to require them to make an effort.”
Mueller writes, “The choice of Andy Rubin and Google’s General Counsel Kent Walker is very questionable. While Google can’t be penalized for the fact that it doesn’t give anyone the title of “President”, those two executives are clearly not at a level with Safra Catz.”
“The current version of Google’s list of “Executive Officers” on the Management page of its website does not include Rubin, nor Walker. By the time I write this, the six persons listed there are Page, Schmidt, Brin, Arora, Drummond, and Pichette. Rubin may report directly to Page, but he’s apparently not among the top six executives. And Walker is not even the top lawyer: that would be David Drummond,” Mueller writes. “I’m sure Judge Alsup will figure this out and draw his conclusions. Maybe he’ll even take a decision that the proposed negotiators are not at the level at which they should be from his point of view.”
Read more in the full article, including Oracles’ and Google’s statements to the court, here.