There are times that we look at Oracle and head honcho Larry Ellison and just shake our heads. Oracle has been involved in a corporate espionage case against SAP for some time now, and had not until recently pursued questioning Léo Apotheker, then SAP CEO, now HP CEO. In fact, it wasn’t until Apotheker took over as HP’s chief that Oracle went after him, and this is following a nasty spat over Oracle’s hiring of Mark Hurd, Apotheker’s forced-out-of-office predecessor at HP.

So, looking to create more public relations mischief, Oracle started going after Apotheker soon after his announcement to take the HP throne, much to the dismay of both HP and SAP. The story took a turn towards the absurd early this week with a report from Reuters that Oracle had hired private investigators to track down Apotheker, who had apparently gone missing/underground since taking the HP helm. Except that he didn’t – Apotheker was spotted in Japan on late last week, where he gave an interview to the Nikkei Business Daily.

This appearance jives pretty well with Apotheker’s statement that he would begin his tenure at HP by traveling on a “listening tour” to learn more about the company he’s now heading. In fact, just this week Apotheker was reported to have popped up at HP facilities in Texas and Massachusetts. This runs counter to Oracle’s claim that he’s running from a subpoena to testify in the Oakland, California, court where their lawsuit against SAP is being tried (overseas Apotheker would be beyond the reach of the subpoena, but within the US he can be compelled to appear). Additionally, Apotheker sightings have been reported in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

Oracle is seeking some $4 billion in damages from SAP. For it’s part, SAP has admitted some liability in the claim, but that it was Texas-based subsidiary TomorrowNow that was responsible for the theft of Oracle’s IP – and that was before SAP bought the company (though the SAP board was apparently aware of it). We don’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but judging by Ellison’s pattern of behavior since the forced resignation of Hurd, we’d hazard a guess that he’s more out to embarrass HP and Apotheker than prove Apotheker’s complicity in the suit.

Source: Reuters (1, 2), MarketWatch

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Oracle’s CEO may have thought he was doing his pal Mark Hurd a solid by hiring him on as Co-President after HP dumped him, but HP isn’t taking too kindly to it. They’ve filed a civil complaint against Hurd, arguing that there’s no way that the ex-CEO could work for Oracle without disclosing the trade secrets he has picked up at HP. The two companies are direct competitors, after all, and HP also notes that they weren’t exactly stingy with his severance package:

Despite being paid millions of dollars in cash, stock and stock options in exchange for Hurd’s agreements to protect HP’s trade secrets and confidential information during his employment and following his departure from his positions at HP as Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, and President, HP is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Hurd has put HP’s most valuable trade secrets and confidential information in peril. Hurd accepted positions with Oracle Corporation (“Oracle”), a competitor of HP, yesterday as its President and as a member of its Board of Directors. In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP’s trade secrets and confidential information to others.

Who’s got popcorn?

Source: HP Data Central

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Ah, lawsuits, so much fun. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a lawsuit over shareholder losses, and we expect it wont be the last time we see such a lawsuit quickly settled. The day after the firing resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd, the company’s stock (HPQ) dropped more than 10%. Hurd, while not necessarily popular within HP, was popular with shareholders. For comparison, when Carly Fiorina was forced out of the Chief Executive position, HP stock rallied. In total, the massive drop erased some $9 billion in shareholder wealth. Shares have continued to drop since, bringing HPQ down to levels not seen since July 2009.

For those with large investments in HP, the drop was a kick in the tender nether regions. One of those large investors is Brockton Contributory Retirement System (BCRS), a $266 million pension fund for Massachusetts public employees. BCRS was so enraged by the stock price drop that the decided to sue HP’s board, Hurd, and acting CEO Cathie Lesjak. The defendants are accused of gross mismanagement of HP, and BRCS alleges that HP’s board could have substantially limited Hurd’s multi-million dollar severance package.

BRCS’s demands are unlikely to be fulfilled. The pension fund wants for HP to restrict Hurd’s severance package (a deal likely negotiated as part of his hiring contract, and again for his firing resignation) and for the defendants to pay back HP for money lost due to the scandal (HP itself has lost little money in the grand scheme – stock value has little effect on the company’s profits). Additionally, the suit demands that HP change its corporate rules to prevent board members from also serving as HP executives (Hurd was both CEO and Chairman).

So you might be asking why Lesjak was named in the suit. Both she and Hurd have also been accused by BRCS of insider trading. Hurd sold some $11 million of HP shares in November and May, while Lesjak sold 5,785 shares of HPQ (around $266,000) on July 30, a few days before Hurd’s departure was announced and she stepped into the interim CEO position.

While we’re not legal scholars my any estimation (okay, Jonathan Ezor actually is), our expectation is to see this settled out-of-court for a few million bucks. For BRCS and their lawyers, it’ll be a good day, while for HP it’ll be a drop in their $14 billion cash-on-hand bucket.

Source: PCMag.com

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When it was announced that HP would be buying Palm for $5.70 a share, we knew the lawsuits were only a second or two away. Sure enough, they were filed, and being the legal geniuses that we aren’t, we thought that such things would blow over once the dust settled. However, pending lawsuits have a tendency to throw wrenches into the whole buying other companies business, so getting it done and out of the way was in the best interests of Palm, HP, and shareholders. To wit, Palm today announced that they are settling the class action suit filed in Delaware over the acquisition. The details of the settlement have not yet been disclosed – they were just filed with the SEC today – but this gets at least one lawyer out of the way so the other lawyers can do their merger and acquisition jobs.

Source: Palm

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As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.

In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned – Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.

Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.

[via: EETimes]

Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!

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We may live in a litigious society, but class action lawsuits are often effective in twisting the arms of big companies to make right what they may do wrong, and now Palm and Sprint are in the legal crosshairs. According to a class action suit filed on behalf of Jason Standiford and others similarly affected, [...]

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File under "inevitable." A class action lawsuit has been filed in California against both Palm and Sprint over the problems some people have been having with restoring their Palm Profile. The suit, filed on behalf of Jason Standiford (and others), seeks "relief for the loss of personal data suffered." The suit repeatedly alleges that Palm only keeps the most recent backup and refreshes it every 24 hours, arguing that "Once a new backup is completed, all information from previous backups becomes irretrievable." We have heard of Palm managing to grab older data, however, as even Standiford experienced:

A few weeks later, Palm contacted Standiford, having recovered some of his information.

We won’t speak to the validity, merit, or scope of the lawsuit, but we can say that more than a few people have lost data because of the issue, which to our understanding is a result of older versions of webOS not properly restoring backups made by newer versions. The best fix is to update any webOS phone with the latest OS with a ‘dummy’ profile before loading your real profile, as we have previously suggested. The second-best fix, we suppose, is to wait and see if this lawsuit squeezes any money out of either Palm or Sprint.

You can go read the entire lawsuit (in PDF form) here (via the Kansas City Star)

Thanks to GoSteelers for the tip!

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Isn’t this a great way to end the week? Fresh off the press came this BusinessWire lawsuit announcement by Artifex Software.

Artifex Software Inc. today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Palm, Inc., based on Palm’s unauthorized copying and distribution of one of Artifex’s registered technologies. Artifex is the developer and copyright owner of muPDF, a high-performance PDF rendering engine. Artifex is well-known as the developer of the Ghostscript family of interpreters. muPDF is Artifex’s lightweight PDF interpreter targeted at the PDA and ebook markets. Palm improperly integrated muPDF in the Palm Pre’s “PDF viewer” application without Artifex’s authorization. Palm’s unauthorized copying of Artifex’s copyrighted muPDF is widespread, as Palm has included “PDF viewer” in every Palm Pre unit shipped since the product’s launch in June 2009. [...]

Palm’s own documentation admits including Artifex’s muPDF in Palm’s Pre product as the PDF rendering engine in their PDF viewer application, but Palm neither obtained a commercial license from Artifex nor complied with the terms of the GPL. Palm’s intentional refusal to comply with the terms of the GPL means that Palm willfully copied and distributed muPDF without authorization, and any and all such copies infringe Artifex’s exclusive copyright.

The documentation Artifex is referring to, is this open source information pdf, the same one included on every webOS device, which described their usage of muPDF as under GNU GPL.  Palm’s open source website includes downloads of the muPDF source, as well as a collection of the modifications Palm has made to is, as part of the GPL compliance.

However it would appear, according to to Artifex, the license requires the application must be licensed under the GNU GPL. This would seem to imply that Palm would need to make the whole pdf browser plugin, and probably the whole pdf viewer application as GPL opensource.

Let’s just hope this all gets sorted out quick.

Thanks to Abyssul for the tip

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