“Today the jury notified Judge William Alsup that it had reached a unanimous decision on all but one question, and were at ‘an impasse’. However, upon entering the courtroom, the foreperson stated to Judge Alsup that not all members of the jury thought sending the note at this time was necessary, with some thinking they could have reached a decision if given the weekend to think over the case further.” Word through the grapevine is that they’re hung up on the fair-use question (i.e., Google infringed, but t may be fair use), but it’s all a guessing game at this point. I do have to wonder if the jury system (which we don’t have here in The Netherlands) is a good fit for complex cases like this.
I hope Google wins, as Oracle will gain a lot of power over a supposed “free” language/api. Knowing Oracle, they’ll certainly abuse their new-found power and extort money from everyone using some kind of implementation of Java.
The jury system isn’t perfect but that’s what we have. Juries have handled much complex cases than this in the past.
All lawyers are taught to present facts… in distorting ways that convince people and makes their customer wins. Later, most of lawyers do exactly that, even if that causes hiding the truth and leaving criminals free to go to the street again.
It takes a well experienced judge to know all those hard-to-see professional techniques used by most of lawyers, and not to be influenced by them.
Also, in this case, it’s also needed to know about APIs, computer languages, consequences, etc. The Oracle vs. Google result afects us all. It’s a hard and very decisive work, must be done by the best.
Edited 2012-05-05 06:46 UTC
Isn’t the trial supposed to last six weeks?
How long has it been so far? There’s still the patent portion of the trial after the copyright part finishes.
— cross posted from my comment slashdot —
You had the previous 2 CEO’s of Sun contradicting each other and the current Oracle CEO not able to give a yes or not answer to “Is Java free”.
How are 12 Joe-Six-Pack’s supposed to come up with a yes or no answer to something explained to them through car analogies?