Rimini Street hit with further $36.8m in damages

A US court has awarded Oracle a further US$27.7 million ($36.8 million) in damages in its legal battle against third-party support provider Rimini Street.

The court has also issued a permanent injunction against Rimini Street preventing the company from making Oracle software available to others or accessing non-public parts of Oracle’s websites.

Rimini Street’s third-party support services for Oracle products at a cheaper price than Oracle’s own maintenance services — which contribute a large part of Oracle’s revenue. Oracle took Rimini Street to court in 2010 alleging that this practice violates its copyright and licences.

The court found last October that Rimini Street had infringed Oracle’s copyright with a decision to host Oracle software on its own servers and clone the software.

In a statement, Rimini Street said it will take “responsibility for its past practices and pay a one-time fair market licence fee of US$35.6 million awarded to Oracle for innocently infringing certain of its software copyrights”.

But the company plans to pursue other aspects of the judgment, including the injunction and the remaining US$88 million of the total US$124 million awarded to Oracle.

“Rimini Street believes it has strong bases for its appeal, which is likely to continue for several more years before a final outcome.”

The company also noted that the trial has confirmed that Oracle licensees are perfectly entitled to choose not to renew their Oracle annual support and purchase third-party support instead.

The jury also found that Rimini Street did not wilfully infringe Oracle copyrights — meaning the company was not aware and had no reason to believe that its acts constituted infringement — and rejected Oracle’s claims of improper business conduct.

But Rimini Street was found to have violated computer access laws by using an automated download process on Oracle’s website.

Rimini Street said it had completed the transition to non-infringing alternative processes no later than July 2014, and had stopped using automated tools to download software from Oracle’s services by early 2009.

Finally, the company noted that the injunction does not prohibit Rimini Street from providing support for Oracle product lines, merely limiting the manner in which it can provide this support. The company will nonetheless seek to have the injunction overturned.

Rimini Street’s business model has been a profitable one — the company has reported 43 consecutive quarters of growth. The company’s recently announced third-quarter results show a 32% increase in revenue to US$41 million, with total client transactions up 77% to a record 149.

Image courtesy of Peter Kaminski under CC