You can order CEOs to mediation, but you can’t make them agree. U.S. District Judge William Alsup may have gotten Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page into a courtroom to try to get them to settle Oracle’s lawsuit over Android and its alleged infringement on Java, but they’re not going to come to an agreement.
For starters, the two companies have this little “gap” between their damage estimates. Oracle started out wanting something on the order of 2.6-billion bucks in damages. Some estimates had Oracle wanting as much as $6.1- billion large. Google thinks $100-million should be sufficient payoff .
So, since there’s a minimum difference of a mere $2.5-billion, I doubt there will be an agreement. But, what do the experts think? I asked two leading intellectual property (IP) law attorneys for their take, and I got two very different views.