The real impact of today's jury verdict in Oracle's long-running and -- as we now know -- overhyped lawsuit against Google means that the case is basically over.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the 10 remaining jurors, who served for about a month, and sent them home.
What happens next depends on how much more money Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wants to spend on litigation. Ellison could find a reason to appeal Oracle's whopper of a loss on its allegations of patent infringement. Or his attorneys could ask the trial judge to overturn the verdict.
Alsup is hardly likely to agree to the latter. And if Oracle chooses to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, it's facing the steepest of uphill climbs: a U.S. legal tradition that protects jury findings unless there's compelling evidence that jurors acted clearly erroneously.
No less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court has said that, once the jury rules, the losing party is "not free to relitigate the factual dispute in a reviewing court."
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