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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Oracle damages in SAP case could top $1 bln: filing

    FRANKFURT
    Fri Jun 27, 2008 9:19am EDT

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    FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Damages sought by software maker Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) could top $1 billion in an intellectual property lawsuit it has brought against arch-rival SAP AG (SAPG.DE), according to a court filing.

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    Oracle is suing TomorrowNow, a U.S. subsidiary of SAP, for corporate theft and alleges it illegally downloaded masses of Oracle customer service materials and passed those documents to

    SAP.

    "Because defendants have not provided Oracle with critical information relevant to liability and resulting damages, Oracle does not yet know its damages with precision," Oracle said in a filing this week to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, California.

    "But, even so, it appears Oracle's damages are, at a minimum, well into the several hundreds of millions of dollars and likely are at least a billion dollars."

    SAP replied in the joint discovery statement: "Oracle speculates wildly about the amount of its damages 'claim' in this discovery report, even though more than a year after this case was filed, Oracle still refuses to identify with any precision the nature or amount of its alleged harm or even to provide the theory on which its damage claim is based."

    SAP has admitted employees of TomorrowNow, which specializes in customer support for PeopleSoft and JD Edwards software, inappropriately downloaded some Oracle materials.

    SAP bought TomorrowNow in 2005 after Oracle bought PeopleSoft, which in turn had acquired JD Edwards -- hoping to exploit uncertainty among PeopleSoft and JD Edwards customers as to how Oracle would support them.

    Germany-based SAP is the world's leading maker of software applications to help large businesses automate and manage functions ranging from human resources to supply chains.

    Oracle, the world's biggest database company, has spent billions on acquisitions over the last few years to challenge SAP's leadership in that area.

    (Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by David Holmes)
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