Google, Oracle CEOs meet but fail to settle lawsuit

New York: The CEOs of global software major Oracle and search engine giant Google failed to reach a deal to end their copyright lawsuit over software copyrights infringement, a media report said.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz and Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai attended the talks in a court for six hours on Friday and discussed the lawsuit that Oracle filed seeking $9.3 billion in damages from Google for use of Java in Android, computerworld.com reported, citing IDG News Service.

“After an earlier run at settling this case failed, the court observed that some cases just need to be tried. This case apparently needs to be tried twice,” Magistrate Judge Paul Singh Grewal, who mediated the talks, was quoted as saying.

Oracle claims that it should receive $475 million in damages in addition to $8.8 billion relating to “profits apportioned to infringed Java copyrights”.

It accused Google of illegally copying a key part of the Java platform into its Android operating system, making billions in profit for Google and crushing Java’s chance of success in smartphones, tablets and other products.

Java was developed by tech firm Sun Microsystems which was acquired by Oracle in 2010.

Meanwhile, Google denies any wrongdoing. It argues that its use of Java is protected by the legal doctrine of “fair use,” which permits copying in some circumstances, the report noted.

In 2012, the companies took the issue to court but the jury was unable to determine whether Google used Java application programming interfaces (APIs) fairly.

The two companies will again meet in court in May.