A U.S. District Court Judge this week rejected some of the damage claims asserted by Oracle Corp. in its 3-1/2-year-old lawsuit alleging corporate theft by enterprise applications rival SAP AG and its defunct TomorrowNow unit.
At the same time, Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton, in a 25-page ruling, granted Oracle’s claims that SAP and TomorrowNow did, in fact, violate 12 Oracle copyrights and federal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, when SAP’s third-party software support business inappropriately downloaded Oracle support materials.
The judge’s rulings followed SAP’s recent admission that its TomorrowNow subsidiary broke the law. “SAP recognizes not only that TomorrowNow made mistakes, but that [Oracle is] entitled to compensation, for which SAP will accept ultimate financial responsibility,” the company said in a recent court filing. “That compensation must be based in reality and the law, however.”
Oracle’s original lawsuit, filed March 22, 2007 in U.S. District Court, charged that beginning in late 2006, SAP and its TomorrowNow third-party maintenance subsidiary engaged in “corporate theft on a grand scale” by illegally downloading support material from Oracle’s Customer Connect website on behalf of SAP’s customers. The suit contends that the allegedly illegal downloads unfairly enabled SAP “to offer cut-rate support services to customers who use Oracle software, and to attempt to lure them to SAP’s applications software platform and away from Oracle’s.”