Oracle may seek more than $1 billion damages from SAP in IPR lawsuit

30 June 2008

Another war between software giants is set to begin, and it will be fought not on consumers' minds and computers, but in the US law courts. Database pioneer Oracle Corp. is reportedly seeking damages exceeding $1 billion (500 million pounds) in an intellectual property rights (IPR) lawsuit it has brought against arch-rival SAP AG, according to a court filing.

Oracle is suing TomorrowNow, an American subsidiary of Germany-based SAP, for corporate theft and alleges it illegally downloaded masses of Oracle customer service materials and passed those documents to SAP.

"Because defendants have not provided Oracle with critical information relevant to liability and resulting damages, Oracle does not yet know its damages with precision," Oracle said in a filing this week to the US District Court in San Francisco, California.

"But, even so, it appears Oracle's damages are, at a minimum, well into the several hundreds of millions of dollars and likely are at least a billion dollars."

SAP countered the charges in the joint discovery statement, saying, "Oracle speculates wildly about the amount of its damages 'claim' in this discovery report, even though more than a year after this case was filed, Oracle still refuses to identify with any precision the nature or amount of its alleged harm or even to provide the theory on which its damage claim is based."

SAP has said that employees of TomorrowNow, which specialises in customer support for PeopleSoft and JD Edwards software, authorized to download materials from Oracle's Web site on behalf of TomorrowNow's customers, but also acknowledged that "some inappropriate downloads of fixes and support documents occurred.''