back to article Support specialist Rimini Street found in contempt of court for continued Oracle copyright infringements

A US court has found Oracle support specialist Rimini Street in contempt of court and ordered it to pay $630,000 in sanctions – peanuts for the $40bn-revenue Big Red software company. In a dispute dragging on for more than a decade, the District Court of Nevada also imposed reasonable attorneys' fees and costs against Rimini, …

  1. FabricWalls

    Wait, so if a customer sends you an archive of their PC's drive for troubleshooting, greasy copyright troll companies like what Oracle appears to be can sue you for copyright infringement if that archive has an installation of their software? If that's the case, then that's a huge overreach and the courts need to protect the people instead of constantly siding with multi-billion dollar corporations.

    1. Jon 37

      Well, of course it's copyright infringement. The customer has a licence to use the software on one pc. If they send it to you, they are distributing copyrighted code, which probably breaks the license terms. If you run it, that is almost certain to break the license terms. If they want a second person to be able to run it, then someone has to pay for another license.

      If that bothers you, you are welcome to stick to free software. But if you choose to use proprietary software, you have to follow the license terms.

    2. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

      Of course. Unless the overarching license conditions state that the end user can create a clone / duplicate environment for development and/or diagnosis purposes.

      In the enterprise space (rather than desktop) many companies do only charge license fees for PROD instances of applications, transactions and services : allowing companies to spin up as many DEV/Test instances of those applications as they need - but again, it all comes down to those T&C's.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With the money from the win they could...

      Not a chance. Islands don't pay for themselves, you know.

  3. Claverhouse Silver badge
    Meh

    Alternatively, it may be safest for people to just not use Oracle at all...

    Does Oracle make more money from software or from suing users ?

    1. Cederic Silver badge

      Re: Alternatively, it may be safest for people to just not use Oracle at all...

      From threatening to sue users.

      They prefer to use the threat, as that way the sales people making it get a chance of commission.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oracle is like ransomware

    It holds you to ransom for exorbitant fees, costs huge amounts of computing power, and if you try to fix it or remove it without paying them then then expect their heavies to turn up and demand more money if you don't comply.

    1. Aitor 1

      Re: Oracle is like ransomware

      This is why people are running away from them.. but for legacy software, it is not soneasy.

  5. TeeCee Gold badge
    Alert

    Peanuts.

    ...also imposed reasonable attorneys' fees and costs against Rimini...

    I suspect that, for a dispute running over ten years, will also make $630k look like peanuts.

  6. MJI Silver badge

    Thank you for the anything but advert

    Another reminder not to use them.

  7. Frank Bitterlich

    Reasonable?

    "... reasonable attorneys' fees ..." - that's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one.

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