Major setback for Google as judge green-lights jury trial in Oracle case

Google has suffered a major setback in its legal dispute with Oracle after a US district judge rejected all but one of its motions for the charges brought by Oracle to be dealt with by a summary judgement.

Doing so would have helped Google avoid a jury trial in the case relating to the alleged use of Oracle's Java technology in Android, but judge William Alsup rejected all but one of the points Google raised.

"This order finds that the names of the various items appearing in the disputed API package specifications are not protected by copyright. To that extent, the motion is granted," he said.

"All of defendant's other summary judgement theories regarding the copyright claim are denied."

V3 contacted Oracle for comment, but had received no reply at the time of publication. Google declined to comment.

Patents expert Florian Mueller described the decision as a "setback" for Google, and warned that the situation could get worse given some of the wording in the judge's decision.

"In a formal sense, Google stood only to gain from this: it was an opportunity to get rid of significant parts of the problem before a possible trial. But the extent to which this summary judgement motion failed is truly remarkable," he said in a blog post.

"More importantly, some of what the judge writes in his 13-page decision indicates that Google is quite likely - at least much more likely than most people thought - to be held liable for copyright infringement at the end of this litigation."

Oracle had originally sued for $2.6bn in damages when it first brought the case, although this figure has since been reduced.

The decision is another boost for Oracle after software rival SAP was forced to pay $20m to the US government for theft of Oracle code after having already paid damages of $272m.