(Updates with request to judge in second paragraph.)
Sept. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. said Oracle Corp. lowered its damages request to at least $2 billion in a patent and copyright dispute over Android software, according to a court filing.
Google, which said the estimate includes $1.2 billion in damages for unjust enrichment in 2012 alone, asked a federal judge to exclude parts of the calculation that it says aren’t supported by the evidence.
In July, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco threw out Oracle’s earlier estimate that it’s entitled to as much as $6.1 billion in damages in a lawsuit claiming Google infringed its Java patents when it created the Android operating system, now running on more than 150 million mobile devices.
Oracle’s new damages report “ignores governing law and the guidelines of this court’s July 22, 2011, order,” Google lawyer Robert Van Nest said in a letter to Alsup yesterday.
Alsup ruled in July that a new estimate should start as low as $100 million, a figure that Mountain View, California-based Google was offered in 2006 to license Java from Sun Microsystems Inc. Google rejected that offer by Sun, which Oracle later acquired.
Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Redwood City, California-based Oracle, the largest maker of database software, declined to comment on the Google filing.
The two companies have made little headway this week in negotiations aimed at resolving the lawsuit, a person briefed on the talks said. Google Chief Executive Larry Page and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison participated in a settlement conference that lasted as long as 10 hours on Sept. 19 and returned to federal court in San Jose, California, today for further meetings with a magistrate judge.
“It’s good to be back,” Page said as he arrived this morning. “I look forward to a productive session.”
Ellison declined to comment when he arrived at court.
The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10-03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco)
--With assistance from Pam McLean in San Jose, California, and Brian Womack and Aaron Ricadela in San Francisco. Editors: Peter Blumberg, Michael Hytha
