Rimini Street: Dispute with Oracle is contract law, not copyright

The latest installment of the years-long legal battle between software support company Rimini Street and Oracle was acted out in the US Ninth Circuit court yesterday. In a ruling issued last October, Rimini Street was fined £27.7m for infringing Oracle's copyright and slapped with an injunction banning Rimini from accessing …

[Oh Homer]

Once again...

Oracle seems to have a chronic difficulty understanding copyright.

In reality I suspect they're just a bunch of delinquent opportunists.

[JasonT]

Re: Once again...

There is no circle of hell deep and dark enough for Oracle to sufficiently punish them for the horror of their turd pile EBusiness Suite.

However, the topic in the article you reference (Oracle trying to copyright APIs), isn't at issue here. It would be if Rimini created their own patches based off of published service bulletins. But that is not what they were doing. They were storing and distributing Oracle-authored documentation, patches, etc.

The company that I was at considered Rimini to see if we could ween ourselves of the fiscal bloodletting of Oracle support. Once Rimini was precluded from distributing Oracle patches in 2014, the best they could promise was to craft patches based upon whatever version of EBS you wound up on when you cut the cord with Oracle. This did not seem to be a very sustainable path, unless one was planning on ditching EBS anyway and just wanted to keep it up and running for a couple of years.

[EveryTime]

Car analogy

OK, I'll pull out the traditional car analogy.

A car rental company leases a car for a week with the provision that it can only be used with one passenger. The renter uses it with three different passengers in sequence. The car rental company claims that is car theft, and wants the car back immediately, damages plus jail time. The renter claims that it is, at most, a contract dispute.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the perfect analogy would be - you buy software and claim that because you bought it it allows you to put it on your web server and allow others download it for free.

[Charles 9]

Not quite. Each downloaded already had a license direct from the source, meaning they were LEGALLY entitled to a copy. Does it matter from where the copy comes?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Each downloaded already had a license direct from the source, meaning they were

>LEGALLY entitled to a copy. Does it matter from where the copy comes?

I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong, but now, try that sentence again with "Movies" or "Music" instead of the implied "software".

I doubt the various Hollywood studios will see it any different then Oracle: It does NOT matter whether you already have a license, you are NOT allowed to download the files from P2P sources, forums or whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, as far as I remember support contract and license to use software are two separate things with Oracle. So you can be perfectly licensed to run the product but without support contract would not have access to updates and patches.

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you subscribed to Netflix and can watch GoT as part of that subscription but also downloaded episode from torrent to be able to watch it where Netflix is not available.

If your argument is correct that does not constitute copyright infringement but I'm not quite sure Netflix would agree.

[Charles 9]

That probably wouldn't count as that would be considered two different formats of the same thing. One not intended for permanent storage.

OTOH, most programs MUST be stored to be usable. It's like with Microsoft and Windows in the past. HOW you got the copy wasn't as important as whether or not the KEY you have is legit.

[John Smith 19]

OMG looks like someone is someone going to see if the EULA is really the BS we think it is.

Popcorn at the ready?

[JulieM]

Business Opportunity

There's got to be a business opportunity migrating Oracle customers over to MariaDB or Postgres. And let's face it, spite can be an excellent motivating factor .....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Business Opportunity

Sure, and if you charge them for work and, more importantly, put clause that the end result is not guaranteed to be fit for purpose or work at all you'll earn significantly much more money.

[DonM.]

tough job to abandon Oracle DB

I don't believe you could find a single entity running Oracle DB that is using the DB standalone. Folks are running specific applications that require Oracle DB as the backend. This is "safe" for the application vendor - how can you possibly go wrong with Oracle as your data store ?? But more and more of these app vendors are also listing MS-SQL as supported. And a large percentage of the small - medium size users are making that switch, or considering it. Your opportunity would not be to get customers to go open source, but to get app vendors to go open source. And there are few of those who have the huevos to abandon Oracle or MS.

[Mark 110]

Re: tough job to abandon Oracle DB

Last time I was at Unilever many years ago, and if you are selling databases is there a bigger consumer, they were migrating their entire database backend for their SAP systems off Oracle onto DB2 because Oracle had tried to milk them too hard. IBM were seriously sugaring the pill mind.

If you want to behave like Oracle you deserve to lose business.

Another company I worked for we resolved a million plus license liability to Oracle they had got themselves into. Zero help from Oracle to get them out of it.

Oracle are cunts. Avoid if possible.