“Google Inc., fighting a patent lawsuit filed by Oracle Corp., lost its appeals court bid to keep secret an engineer’s e-mail that says the Web search company should negotiate a license for Java technology,” Susan Decker reports for Bloomberg.
“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington today denied Google’s request to overturn a judge’s order that the information could be presented to a jury when the case goes to trial,” Decker reports. “Tim Lindholm wrote the e-mail in August 2010, days before Oracle alleged in a lawsuit that Google’s Android operating system had been designed using patented and copyrighted features of Oracle’s Java programming language.”
Decker reports, “In the e-mail to Andrew Rubin, the executive in charge of Google’s mobile division, Lindholm said he was asked by company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to ‘investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome.’ ‘We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck,’ Lindholm wrote. ‘We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.’ Google said the e-mail was mistakenly disclosed to Oracle.”
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MacDailyNews Take: The drumbeats grow louder.
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