Business-management software company Oracle Corp. has decided that $272 million just isn’t enough to ease the hurt it sustained when the software maintenance unit of its competitor, SAP AG, allegedly illegally downloaded its software. Rather than accept U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton’s September 2011 decision to reduce the verdict from $1.3 billion, Oracle is seeking a new trial, according to a court filing, Bloomberg reports.
The jury’s $1.3 billion verdict in November 2010 was based on the hypothetical value of the license SAP would have needed to use Oracle’s software. However, Judge Hamilton found it “grossly excessive,” saying that the evidence did not show that Oracle had ever granted such a license to a competitor, and therefore it couldn’t recover lost license fees.
“Oracle’s objective is to obtain clarification of the law and, if it is right about what the law is and what the evidence supports in this case, to vindicate the verdict of the jury and Oracle’s intellectual property rights as a copyright owner,” Geoffrey Howard, Oracle’s attorney, said in the filing.
