The jury in the Oracle v. Google trial rendered a partial verdict,
favoring Oracle, in the copyright phase of the trial. Yet a question the
jury failed to decide prompted Google to call for a mistrial, and could
sharply limit damages even if the verdict stands.
The five
male and seven female jurors failed to deliver unanimous answers to four
detailed questions (see below) Judge William Alsup provided them prior
to deliberations. The questions aimed to determine whether Google’s
Android mobile platform infringed on part of the Java programming language that Oracle acquired from Sun in 2010.
The
entire jury did agree on the first, and most important, question —
that’s 1A, for those of you following with the scorecard — finding that
Google did infringe the overall structure, sequence and organization of
Oracle’s Java language (which the judge had told instructed the jury to
assume was copyrighted, although that question remains unsettled).
