Google Wants $4 Million After Winning Oracle Patent Lawsuit

Google filed a brief with federal court on Thursday in which the company asked Oracle to pay $4 million. In the request Google lead counsel Rober Van Nest argues that Oracle is required to pay the company’s legal costs because a judge ruled in favor of Google on almost every single claim filed by Oracle over a six-week trial.

In the Google brief the company claims:

“Google prevailed on a substantial part of the litigation. [Oracle] recovered none of the relief it sought in this litigation. Accordingly, Google is the prevailing party and is entitled to recover costs.”

While Google has not made its itemized list of expenses known to the public it has asked that Oracle pay $2.9 million that the company spent on copying and organizing documents. According to Google’s brief the company handled 97 million documents.

The ongoing legal battle between Oracle and Google started in 2010 after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystem and then filed a copyright and patent lawsuit regarding the cloning of 37 Java APIs (application programming interfaces). The company also claimed that Google lifted code line for line.

Oracle and Google spent one year in pre-trial preparation before spending six-weeks in court. During the case a judge and jury decided that Google’s use of just nine lines of code and two test files from Sun Microsystem was not enough to facilitate infringement. Judge William Alsup determined that Google owed Oracle nothing for using several small pieces of code.

The fate of Google’s $4 million legal expenses request will now be approved or denied by William Alsup.