Eric Schmidt Plays Good Defense at the Oracle-Google Trial
Eric Schmidt took the witness stand Tuesday in Oracle’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, and he gave little ground during some tense exchanges with Oracle’s attorney, reports PCWorld.
In the suit, Oracle accuses Google of infringing its Java copyrights in the Android operating system. Schmidt is chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Schmidt, the first witness to testify, was initially questioned by Google’s own attorneys, and testified that Google did not believe it needed a license to use 37 Java application programming interfaces for which Oracle owns the copyright. But on cross-examination, Oracle’s attorney asked him if Google’s APIs are treated as proprietary.
“Are you telling me that you don’t treat your APIs as proprietary?” Oracle attorney Peter Bicks asked Schmidt.
