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Oracle-SAP case goes to jury to decide damages

23.11.2010
SAP has admitted to the "massive and prolonged" infringement of Oracle's copyrights and should pay at least US$1.7 billion in damages, an Oracle attorney said Monday as the companies' corporate theft lawsuit entered its final stages.

Lawyers for Oracle and SAP made their closing arguments Monday morning at the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California. The case was then sent to the eight-person jury for deliberation, and a verdict seems likely before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday.

SAP has admitted that its now-closed TomorrowNow subsidiary illegally downloaded massive amounts of software and support materials from an Oracle website. The trial is to determine how much SAP must pay Oracle in damages.

Oracle says the sum should reflect the value of the software to SAP at the time it acquired TomorrowNow in 2005. "However you do the calculations, it's clear there were billions of dollars at stake here for SAP," David Boies, an attorney for Oracle, told the jury in his closing remarks.

Oracle says SAP planned to use the stolen software, which included support materials for Oracle's PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications, to try to convert Oracle customers over to SAP applications.

"They were sucking out the software so hard, so fast and so extensively that they actually crashed Oracle's servers," Boies said, citing evidence presented earlier at trial.