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Oracle Wins Permanent Injunction Against Rimini Street
- Client News
- July 26, 2023
Paul, Weiss won a major bench trial victory in the District of Nevada on behalf of Oracle in a high-stakes, long-running copyright infringement dispute with Rimini Street Inc. Issuing an extraordinary injunction order on July 24, the court ordered Rimini to shut down its automated tools—a significant part of its software support business—and issue and prominently post a 15-point press release in which Rimini discloses its untruths to the public.
In addition to developing enterprise software, Oracle earns revenues providing support for its copyrighted software products. In 2005, Rimini Street launched a competing business selling support for Oracle’s software products by stealing a library of Oracle’s copyrighted software and selling its support services at a rate 50% below that of Oracle’s.
Oracle first sued Rimini in 2010, winning a trial verdict in 2015, sustained on appeal, ultimately receiving $90 million in damages, costs and attorneys’ fees for copyright infringement. Oracle subsequently won a permanent injunction barring Rimini’s infringement, and then in 2021 won a contempt hearing finding Rimini in violation of that injunction.
But in 2014, Rimini filed a declaratory judgment action, known as Rimini II, alleging that it had changed its software support practices. Oracle filed counterclaims for copyright infringement, business torts and other violations, challenging these new practices.
The core of Oracle’s claims in the current case was whether Rimini’s third-party software support practices continued to violate Oracle’s copyrights, including for the widely used PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning software products. The Paul, Weiss team gathered and presented detailed evidence of this infringement, which it presented during a two-week trial last December. At trial, our team showed through direct and cross-examination of numerous fact and expert witnesses that Rimini Street continued to infringe on Oracle’s copyrights via its campaign to “migrate” the environments found to be infringing in Rimini I to its customers’ own locally hosted systems, and its use of automated systems to create prototype software updates in one customer’s licensed software and replicate them across all its other customers’ software environments.
Calling Rimini Street a “recidivist infringer,” U.S. District Judge Miranda M. Du found that Rimini Street had once again repeatedly and willfully violated Oracle’s copyrights and removed Oracle’s copyright notices from Oracle software in an attempt at an end run around a previous permanent injunction the trial team won in 2018. The judge entered a permanent injunction dramatically limiting Rimini’s longtime support practices, including requiring Rimini to immediately and permanently discontinue use of its automated tools, a major part of its software support business model, because they “facilitate and automate Rimini’s prototype and distribute model” and “are engines for impermissible cross-use of Oracle’s PeopleSoft software,” which “allowed Rimini to hide what its developers were doing.” The court also ordered Rimini to delete infringing software “development environments” that it had copied from its computer systems to customers’ computer systems and has continued to use for almost 10 years in order to provide support.
In her 198-page order, she also found that the company made at least 15 types of false statements regarding its support practices, ordering Rimini to issue a corrective press release and website post.
Additionally, the judge found Rimini’s founder and CEO Seth Ravin personally liable for Rimini’s copyright infringement, copyright notice removal and false advertising, finding that Mr. Ravin “materially contributed to and induced Rimini’s infringement of Oracle’s copyrights” and “knowingly participated in the creation and propagation of Rimini’s false advertising related to its infringing support practices.”
The court rejected Rimini’s sole remaining claim against Oracle, ruling that Oracle did not violate the California Unfair Competition Law.
The Paul, Weiss team included litigation partners Bill Isaacson, Karen Dunn and Jessica Phillips.