Judge in Google, Oracle case seeks names of paid reporters, bloggers

A photo of the Google Inc. logo is shown on a computer screen in San Francisco, California July 16, 2009.

Credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Aug 8, 2012 12:38am EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc and Oracle Corp's copyright and patent battle took a strange twist on Tuesday, after a judge ordered the companies to disclose the names of journalists, bloggers and other commentators on their payrolls.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup said he was concerned that Google and Oracle and/or their counsel may have retained or paid people who may have published comment on the case.

The order, several months after a jury found that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents, hints at the possibility of a hidden world of for-pay press coverage and injects uncertainty into the widely-followed case.

Alsup issued a one page order but did not go into full details of the court's concerns.

"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 the case," Alsup wrote in Tuesday's order.

He said the information "would be of use on appeal" and could "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."

The companies must submit the information by noon August 17.

Oracle sued Google in federal court, claiming the search engine giant's Android mobile platform violated its patents and copyright to Java, seeking roughly $1 billion on its copyright claims.

But the jury ruled in Google's favor and the judge decided Oracle could not claim copyright protection on most of the Java material that Oracle took to trial.

Oracle has said it will appeal.

The trial, which featured testimony from high-profile technology executives including Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page, attracted heavy media coverage from the mainstream press and technology-focused blogs.

One of the more well-known bloggers on intellectual property matters and on the Oracle vs Google case, Florian Mueller, revealed three days into the trial that Oracle had recently become a consulting client of his. People who followed the case said they weren't aware of any other similar examples.

An Oracle spokeswoman said in a statement that the company has "always disclosed all of its financial relationships in this matter, and it is time for Google do to the same. We read this order to also include indirect payments to entities who, in turn, made comments on behalf of Google."

Google said the company would comply with the order.

What impact the order could have on the case remains unclear, legal experts said.

"I haven't seen anything quite like this before. I think the judge is in uncharted territory with this order," said Eric Goldman, a professor of Internet law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Goldman said two potential reasons for the order would be if there were evidence that the jury had been swayed by extensive press coverage of the case or if the jury had relied on evidence not properly labeled as unbiased, such as a for-pay news article offered as an exhibit in the trial.

Goldman, who blogged about the case, said that he might likely appear on the list, since his website features ads distributed by Google's online advertising network.

"The court has really wide discretion in granting a remedy to fix any kind of wrongdoing," said Julie Samuels, an intellectual property attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Samuels said the judge could order a retrial, but stressed that would be a highly extreme and unlikely scenario.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Oracle America, Inc v. Google Inc, 10-3561.

(Editing by Michael Perry)

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Apple, Google bid on Kodak patents: report

Kodak World Headquarters is pictured in Rochester, New York January 19, 2012.

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European ruling on Google privacy policy set for September

PARIS | Tue Jul 10, 2012 11:30am EDT

PARIS (Reuters) - France's data protection watchdog said it will likely wrap up the inquiry of Google's new privacy policy, which it is conducting on behalf of European regulators, in September.

France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique (CNIL) had expected to decide in June whether Google's new approach to privacy that took effect in March conforms with European law, but the process has been slowed as the company provided more information to the regulator.

"We just received answers to questions we put to the company in May, and we are studying them closely," said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the director of the CNIL, at a press conference on Tuesday.

The CNIL will then draw its conclusions and present them to the wider group of data protection regulators of the 27 European Union member states, known as the G29.

Under its new approach, Google consolidated 60 privacy policies into one and completed its ability to pool the data collected on users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and its social network Google+

The Mountain View, California-based search giant says this allows it to better tailor search results and improve services for consumers. Users are not allowed to opt out.

The CNIL review could lead to financial penalties of up to 300,000 euros or administrative sanctions for the U.S. search giant, but it is not clear whether they would be imposed collectively or if individual states would seek their own fines.

The Wall Street Journal reported late on Monday that Google is close to paying $22.5 million to settle charges that it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple's Safari browser.

The fine would be the largest penalty ever levied on a single company by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Journal said citing officials briefed on the settlement terms.

(Reporting by Gwenaelle Barzic; Writing by Leila Abboud; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

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Google to pay $22.5 million to settle privacy charges: source

People visit Google's stand at the National Retail Federation Annual Convention and Expo in New York January 16, 2012.

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U.S. investigating Google unit over patent licensing

A posed picture shows a Motorola Droid phone displaying the Google search page in New York August 15, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid

WASHINGTON | Fri Jun 29, 2012 8:46pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. antitrust regulators are investigating whether Google (GOOG.O) unit Motorola Mobility is living up to licensing commitments made when its patents were adopted as industry standards, two people familiar with the probe said on Friday.

The Federal Trade Commission sent civil investigative demands, essentially civil subpoenas, to companies this week asking them about Motorola Mobility's licensing practices, one person said.

The industry standards affected have to do with Wi-Fi and video standards, one of the people said.

Motorola Mobility has sued Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) for infringement of industry standard patents and asked for its Xbox product to be barred from the U.S. market.

Standard-setting bodies meet periodically to determine which technology will be used industry-wide, which ensures devices will work together. Companies who hold those patents commit to licensing them broadly and on reasonable terms, even to competitors.

"We take our commitments to license on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms very seriously," a Google spokeswoman said in an email when asked about the probe.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft confirmed receipt of the FTC inquiry but declined to describe what was in it. Apple Inc (AAPL.O) declined comment on whether it received a similar inquiry.

The FTC declined to comment.

The FTC also has a broader investigation underway into whether Google distorts its search results to steer people to its related businesses, like Google Places. The agency recently hired a big name litigator, Beth Wilkinson, to lead its probe.

Bloomberg was the first to report the Motorola patent investigation on Friday.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz and Poornima Gupta; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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Google CEO says "nothing seriously wrong": source

Google CEO Larry Page speaks during a press announcement at Google's headquarters in New York, May 21, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Jun 22, 2012 9:08pm EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc Chief Executive Larry Page has reassured employees about his health, but the company on Friday shed little additional light on an unspecified condition affecting his voice that will sideline him from two high-profile events in the coming weeks.

Page told employees in an email on Thursday that there was "nothing seriously wrong with me," according to a source who had seen an internal staff memo.

The 39-year-old Google co-founder sat out his company's annual shareholders' meeting on Thursday because he had "lost his voice," according to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who informed attendees of the news at the start of the event.

The condition will also cause Page to miss Google's annual developer conference next week as well as its quarterly results announcement next month.

Page continues to run Google's business, but has been asked to rest his voice, according to a Google spokeswoman. The company declined further comment on his condition.

The prolonged absence from the public spotlight raises questions about his condition, and the company's obligation to disclose issues of concern to shareholders.

Corporate governance experts say Google has met minimal disclosure requirements but will face increasing pressure while Page remains out of sight.

On Friday, Google's shares rose 1.1 percent to $571.48, lifted along with the rest of the Nasdaq.

"It gets them over the first disclosure hurdle, that is they've alerted shareholders to the fact he's going to have this health effect," said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University who specializes in corporate governance issues. "The tough questions still lie ahead, and there will be continued pressure to keep answering those tough questions."

While many people, including senior business executives, prefer to keep health matters private, public company CEOs have responsibilities to a "wide set of constituents, some of whom have a legitimate claim to know about material information," said Post.

The issue came to the fore several years ago when Apple Inc was criticized for being less than forthright about the health of CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer.

"With the concerns over Steve Jobs, people are quick to jump to a conclusion that may not be the right conclusion to jump to," said Needham & company analyst Kerry Rice.

Page's health could be regarded as an especially significant issue because he, along with Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin, have majority control of the Internet company through special voting shares.

Wall Street analysts mostly took the news of Page's extended absence in stride, though some expressed concern about the lack of information.

"It's the number one thing I'm concerned about today just because there's so little data available," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.

JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth noted that Page has not posted any messages to his Google+ profile since May 25.

"We have no specific reason to think there is anything more to Larry's condition, but we find it odd that the company would already rule him out of the 2Q call, which is likely still a few weeks away," Anmuth wrote to clients late on Thursday.

"This could raise some questions among investors."

Simon Best, a head and neck surgery specialist at the Johns Hopkins Voice Center, said most cases where a doctor might order a patient to rest their voice involved either a vocal chord hemorrhage, or throat surgery of some sort.

"We actually very rarely put people on complete voice rest where they are not cleared to talk or allowed to talk," West said. "There are probably some practice differences between physicians and whoever is treating him, but there are only two scenarios where we put people on voice rest: if they've had vocal cord surgery, or if they've had a vocal chord hemorrhage."

Best, who has not treated Page, said hemorrhages were easily treatable, but a wide variety of conditions might necessitate surgery.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the details of Page's internal memo on Friday.

During the shareholder meeting on Thursday, Google's Schmidt tried to lighten the situation by relaying comments that co-founder Brin had made about Page's condition: Sergey "has said that this problem will make Larry a better CEO because he's going to have to choose his words very carefully."

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic with additional reporting by Salimah Ebrahim; Editing by Gary Hill)

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Judge blocks Apple in Google smartphone war

By Dan Levine and Jessica Dye

Sat Jun 23, 2012 12:36am EDT

n">(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday ruled that Apple Inc cannot pursue an injunction against Google's Motorola Mobility unit, effectively ending a key case for the iPhone maker in the smartphone patent wars.

The ruling came from Judge Richard Posner in Chicago federal court. He dismissed the litigation between Apple and Motorola Mobility with prejudice, meaning it can't be refiled.

The ruling is a blow for Apple, which had hoped a decisive ruling against Motorola would help it gain an upper hand in the smartphone market against Android.

"Apple is complaining that Motorola's phones as a whole ripped off the iPhone as a whole," Posner wrote. "But Motorola's desire to sell products that compete with the iPhone is a separate harm -— and a perfectly legal one -— from any harm caused by patent infringement."

Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet declined to comment on the ruling. Motorola Mobility spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said the company was pleased that Posner dismissed Apple's case.

Both parties have the option to appeal Posner's ruling.

Motorola sued Apple in October 2010, a move that was widely seen as a pre-emptive strike against an imminent Apple lawsuit. Apple filed its own claims against Motorola the same month.

Posner issued a series of pre-trial rulings that eliminated nearly all of Motorola's patent claims against Apple from the prospective trial, while maintaining more of Apple's claims against Motorola. That meant Apple had more to gain in the trial, which had been set to start last week.

However, Posner canceled the trial earlier this month.

Apple had sought an injunction barring the sale of Motorola products using Apple's patented technology. But in Friday's ruling, Posner wrote that neither party is entitled to an injunction.

Since Motorola could design around the minor technological features covered by Apple's patents, an injunction would be an inappropriate windfall for Apple, Posner wrote.

Posner also said that Apple had not clearly demonstrated that Motorola phones caused a loss of consumer goodwill significant enough for an injunction.

"To suggest that it has suffered loss of market share, brand recognition, or customer goodwill as a result of Motorola's alleged infringement of the patent claims still in play in this case is wild conjecture," Posner wrote.

In a bright spot for the iPhone maker, Posner also ruled that Motorola could not seek an injunction based on the one patent in the case that it was still asserting against Apple.

Motorola had pledged to license that patent - which covers an aspect of wireless communication - on fair and reasonable terms to other companies in exchange for having the technology adopted as an industry standard.

"How could it be permitted to enjoin Apple from using an invention that it contends Apple must use if it wants to make a cell phone," Posner wrote.

At a hearing earlier this week, Apple had argued that it would be satisfied with an injunction forcing Motorola to remove Apple's patented features within three months. But Posner found that proposal unworkable, in part because of the hardship in administering such an order.

"Because of the potential costs to Motorola and the federal judiciary I could not responsibly order injunctive relief in favor of Apple," he wrote in his ruling.

The case is Apple Inc. and NeXT Software Inc. V. Motorola Inc. and Motorola Mobility Inc., in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, no. 11-08540.

(Reporting by Dan Levine in Oakland, California and Jessica Dye in New York; Editing by Gary Hill and Jeremy Laurence)

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Analysis: With Siri and new alliances, Apple takes on Google search

An Apple logo is seen at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco, California June 11, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam

By Poornima Gupta

SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Jun 21, 2012 12:08am EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When Apple Inc sends out its coveted invitations to major events, one CEO has always been making the guest list of late: Jeremy Stoppelman.

The co-founder and chief executive officer of consumer review website Yelp Inc has never taken the stage at these gatherings, but his company has become an important weapon in Apple's arsenal as it steps up its assault on ally-turned-rival Google Inc.

Yelp and a handful of other major consumer content sites, including movie reviewer Rotten Tomatoes and restaurant reservation service OpenTable, will be helping to power Apple's Siri, the voice-activated iPhone personal assistant, in the new mobile operating system iOS6.

The relationship between Apple and Yelp illustrates the power struggle over how people find what they are looking for on the Internet. Much more than just a clever feature, Siri is emerging as a key tool for what some in the industry call "casual search" - quickly finding routine information such as a restaurant location.

This can bypass Google and other traditional search engines. That serves the interests of Apple, which sees an opportunity to muscle in on its rival's core business and build related advertising revenue.

Siri is also a potential lifeline for Yelp and other content companies, which have found themselves competing with Google.

"Google is a direct competitor to Yelp, and I am sure Yelp is aware of that," said Larry Cornett, founder of product strategy firm Brilliant Forge and former head of consumer products at Yahoo Inc. Yelp, which depends a lot on Google for traffic, will probably be "ecstatic" about the direct traffic it will get through Apple's upcoming version of Siri.

Google still reigns supreme in search, loved by consumers for its relevant results and advertisers for its reach. Deep-pocketed rivals, particularly Microsoft Corp with its Bing search engine, have tried in vain for years to reduce Google's dominance.

Rather than compete with Google on keyword search - which would mean battling algorithms refined by the millions of searches performed every day - Apple is taking a different tack by focusing on a subset of the search universe that users are mostly likely to scour while they are out and about.

That includes restaurants, movies, sports, business listings, maps and locations - where quick, digestible bite-sized results are desired, rather than the more involved research that users perform with Google. The increasing use of mobile devices for accessing the Internet only plays into this trend.

Advertisers value these searches, which are closely linked to location, time and intent, said David Tennenhouse, venture capitalist with New Venture Partners and former CEO of A9.com, the search unit of Amazon.com Inc.

"You can think of this as cream-skimming," Tennenhouse said. "Can I skim off some of the most valuable searches? There is a huge range of value here."

The stakes are high, said Oren Etzioni, a search and artificial intelligence expert at the University of Washington's computer science department.

"Google is very difficult to dislodge on the desktop," he said, "but mobile search is a very different beast, and the jury is still out on the question of who the ultimate winner in mobile (search) is."

'TRUSTED PERSONAL ASSISTANT'

Apple and Google are increasingly at odds, largely due to the rivalry between the iPhone and Google's Android smartphone software. As the rivalry escalates, Apple is systematically dialing back its reliance on Google services - most recently by announcing it is going into mapping big-time.

Siri is still in a beta or "trial" version, and users have criticized failings such as misinterpreted words, odd results and incomplete data. But Apple is betting that the fast-evolving technology will improve enough over time to spearhead its foray into Google's domain.

Google is still available on the iPhone, and users can even ask Siri specifically to search it for answers. Apple's strategy, however, is to reduce Google's relevance on its devices as it doubles down on the investment in the voice-enabled software, experts said.

The company's goal is to build Siri into a "trusted personal assistant," Tennenhouse said.

"The disintermediation of Google by Apple is really a matter of Apple putting together a front end, which happens to be Siri for now, and linking it directly to the high-frequency searches," said Roger Kay, technology analyst with EndPoint Technologies. "And in doing so, bypass the general search mode and more importantly, bypass Google's advertising pages."

LOCAL IS KING

Marketing research firm eMarketer forecast 30 percent growth in the U.S. search advertising market to $19.5 billion this year from $15 billion in 2011. Google accounts for about three-quarters of that market.

The company has a lesser, but still substantial, hold on the mobile advertising market. That generated $1.45 billion last year, with Google controlling about half, while Apple had 6.4 percent, eMarketer said. It expects the total market to be worth $2.6 billion this year.

Apple devices running the company's iOS operating system are the biggest source of Google's mobile revenue, generating roughly 40 percent of the total, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Mobile search has long been focused on local information, such as finding which local stores have discounts or which French restaurant in the area is the best-rated. But no one has yet been able to develop the content fully.

Google signaled its seriousness about the sector when it bought Zagat last year and vowed to make the popular dining ratings authority a cornerstone of its local information offerings. In late 2009, Google was in talks to acquire Yelp for at least $500 million, according to news reports at the time, but no deal resulted.

Yelp is now one of the few websites that is deeply integrated into iOS, featured not only in Siri but also in business listings for Apple's new map service.

Yelp's Stoppelman said the mapping integration was key, as searches are often location-based. He also says the Yelp app on the iPhone can readily integrate user reviews into the search functionality.

"Google just doesn't have that data," he said. "Yelp has the most word of mouth."

But Apple's success in search hinges almost entirely on the success of Siri.

Voice-recognition technology is not new, and users have so far not taken to it in great numbers. Google added this capability in its flagship Web search engine and its Android phones far earlier than Apple, but it is unclear how many people use it.

Whether Siri will be the answer also remains to be seen, New Venture Partners' Tennenhouse said. "The test always is: If you were to take this away from people, will they feel impoverished?"

(Additional reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell and Lisa Von Ahn)

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