Jobs image licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (version 1.2 or any later versions); Ellison patch By Thomas Hawk
Oracle reportedly refused the offer on the basis that it was too low. The company had previously been claiming infringement across seven different patents, but was told by Judge William Alsup to slim down the claims.
If a settlement cannot be reached, the trial is scheduled to begin on 16 April.
Oracle declined to provide comment in response to a ZDNet UK request. Google had not responded at the time of writing.
After Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal had ordered Oracle and Google to hold another round of talks before the start of their trial, Google has now offered settlement terms that were promptly rejected by Oracle. The company is suing Google for allegedly violating some of its Java-related patents and copyrights on the Java API in the Dalvik virtual machine that is part of Android.
Google had offered Oracle 0.5% of Android revenues until the end of 2012 – at which point Oracle's patent RE38104 expires – and going forward 0.015% of revenues until April of 2018 (based on patent 6,061,520). This deal would have been subject to the fact that Oracle could actually prove violations of these two patents. Oracle, however, turned the offer down as too low.
The parties have responded to the Court's request for supplemental briefs on certain copyright issues. The Google brief addresses the issue of whether Apache Harmony, and its incorporated APIs, are subject to a field-of-use restriction imposed by Sun. (831 [PDF; Text]) Oracle's brief addresses the applicability of Baker v. Selden. (833 [PDF; Text])
Google asserts that Sun's field-of-use restriction only arose if you licensed the Java technology development kit (TDK) to assure compatibility between your version of Java and the standard version produced by Sun, and if you took that license and assured compatibility, you were then licensed to use Sun's Java trademark to reference your compatible version. The Apache Foundation was never willing to license the TDK under those conditions, never did so, and refrained from calling or referencing Harmony as Java. As a consequence, Harmony has never been subject to the TDK field-of-use restrictions, and Sun never attempted to enforce those restrictions against Apache. Assuming the API implementations used by Google are those found in Apache, and given that Google does not refer to Android as Java or Java-compatible, this would appear to be a compelling argument.