Google and Oracle Ordered To Reveal Paid Writers

One of the biggest tech lawsuits of our time is that of Oracle Corp. vs Google Inc. over the use of Java in their Android mobile OS platform. Although a federal judge has already declared the use of Java was under the “fair use” statute, U.S. District Judge William Alsup has ordered both parties to disclose any and all payments made to bloggers, writers or journalists who wrote about the case. Judge Aslup went on to say that he is concerned the companies are paying others to write about the on-goings related to the case, and the mandatory disclosure will hopefully bring to light any such payments made from the two tech companies.

Original Lawsuit

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the Oracle Corp. vs Google Inc. case. Contrary to what some people believe, it wasn’t a slam-dunk case for either of the two parties involved. On May 7th, a jury found that Google did in fact infringe upon the copyrights of Oracle’s Java software when they developed and use the Android OS platform. However, the jury remained deadlocked when trying determine whether it was covered by the fair use. On May 23rd, the jury decided that it was fair use and that Oracle Corp. wasn’t allowed to receive the $1 billion they were seeking.

Aslup went on to say  “The court is concerned that the parties and/or counsel herein may have retained or paid print or internet authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have and/or may publish comments on the issues in this case,” he continued by adding  “and although proceedings in this matter are almost over, they are not fully over yet and, in any event, the disclosure required by this order would be of use on appeal or on any remand to make clear whether any treatise, article, commentary or analysis on the issues posed by this case are possibly influenced by financial relationships to the parties or counsel,”

How Many Bloggers are We Talking About?

One of Google’s primary methods for generating advertising revenue is through their Adsense platform. Google is concerned that Aslup is seeking the financial data for all of their Adsense publishers which have wrote about the case. You have to realize that millions of publishers and webmasters use the Adsense platform to generate revenue on their website. If Google is forced to hand over this information, we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of publishers, which is a huge task even for Google to accomplish.