Oracle says Google generated more than $42 billion from Android (ORCL)

AP

By Oracle's reckoning, Android has generated $42.35 billion for Google between 2008 and 2015, mostly thanks to selling ads. 

That's what Oracle's expert economist, Dr. Adam Jaffe, testified to in court on Wednesday.

Google doesn't discuss how much money it generates from Android. While we can't say for sure that this ongoing court battle with Oracle is one reason why it keeps it mouth shut, we can say that its silence means Oracle has used its own means to come up with this number.

And, with every passing month, that number from Oracle keeps rising.

In January, court documents showed that Oracle estimated Android generated $31 billion for Google, Bloomberg reported at the time, and $22 million in profit.

This is all part of Oracle's lawsuit to convince a jury to make Google pay billions of dollars in damages over Android. The two companies have been in court this month in the final leg of a multiyear lawsuit.

Less than 1% of Android code

In the previous phases of the lawsuit, Google was found to have copied 32 application programming interfaces (APIs) from another popular language called Java. APIs are bits of computer code that let two applications talk to each other and share data.

At the trial on Wednesday, Oracle's economic expert, Dr. Adam Jaffe, admitted that the code at issue amounts to less than 1% of all the lines of code in Android.

Google admits that it used the APIs from Java without paying. Java was owned by Sun Microsystems at the time. After Oracle acquired Sun, it sued Google over those APIs, claiming copyright infringement and huge damages.

Oracle is expected to ask for 8.8 billion in damages from Google, and that's why it's arguing that Android has generated so much money for Google. 

If Oracle has its way, Google would have to pay fines that are greater than what Oracle paid to acquire Sun to begin with. Oracle bought Sun for $7.4 billion in 2009, (which was closer to $5.4 billion if you subtract Sun's cash on hand.)

In the meantime, Google is arguing that APIs should fall into the fair use provision of the copyright law, in which case, it will owe Oracle nothing.

Back in 2012, Europe declared that APIs are not even copyrightable.

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