Google Loses Effort to Seal Records in Android Patent Lawsuit With Oracle

By Phil Milford - Aug 2, 2011 10:16 AM ET

Google Inc. (GOOG), the world’s largest Internet search company, lost a bid to seal some papers in a patent-infringement lawsuit filed last year by a unit of software maker Oracle Corp. (ORCL)

Claiming attorney-client privilege, Google sought to protect parts of a transcript of a hearing about expert witnesses containing references to a company document, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said in an order yesterday.

The document mentioned is “an incomplete draft of an e- mail message” and “never was sent to anyone,” Alsup wrote in denying Mountain View, California-based Google’s request. “Thus, the document is not a communication of any type, much less a communication protected by the attorney-client privilege.”

Oracle America Inc., based in Redwood City, California, sued Google, alleging patent infringement over the use of Java technology in Google’s Android operating system, according to an amended complaint filed Oct. 27.

Alsup wrote in a July 22 filing that the passage in question was from an internal e-mail in 2010 to Google executive Andy Rubin saying “the technical alternatives to using Java for Android ‘all suck’ and stating, ‘we conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.’”

Willa Lo, a Google spokeswoman, didn’t immediately return voice and e-mail messages seeking comment on the ruling.

The case is Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc., 10CV03561, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

To contact the reporter on this story: Phil Milford in Wilmington, Delaware, at pmilford@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net.