Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison achieve victory for Oracle against Rimini Street

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison achieve victory for Oracle against Rimini Street

The court directs the support service provider to shut down its automated tools

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP has won a major victory in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada on behalf of Oracle in a high-stakes, long-running copyright infringement dispute with Rimini Street Inc.

Recently, while issuing an extraordinary injunction order, the court directed Rimini to shut down its automated tools, a significant part of its software support business. It further ordered Rimini to issue, and prominently post a 15-point press release, disclosing its untruths to the public.

In addition to developing enterprise software, Oracle earns revenues by providing support for its copyrighted software products.

In 2005, Rimini launched a competing business selling support for Oracle’s software products by stealing a library of its copyrighted software and selling its support services, 50 percent below Oracle’s rate.

Oracle first sued Rimini in 2010, winning a trial verdict in 2015, and sustained on appeal, ultimately receiving $90 million in damages, costs, and attorneys’ fees for copyright infringement. Subsequently, it won a permanent injunction barring Rimini’s infringement. In 2021, it won a contempt hearing finding Rimini violating the injunction.

Meanwhile, in 2014, Rimini had filed a declaratory judgment action, known as Rimini II, alleging that it had changed its software support practices. However, Oracle filed counterclaims for copyright infringement, business torts, and other violations, challenging the new practices.

Oracle questioned whether Rimini’s third-party software support practices continued to violate Oracle’s copyrights, including the widely used PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning software products.

The Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison team gathered and presented detailed evidence of the infringement, which it presented during a two-week trial in December last.

The legal team showed through direct and cross-examination of numerous facts and expert witnesses that Rimini 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. It included the 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.

Terming Rimini a “recidivist infringer,” US District Judge Miranda M. Du found that Rimini repeatedly and willfully violated copyrights and removed Oracle’s copyright notices from the software. This was an attempt to run around a previous permanent injunction the trial team had won in 2018.

The judge entered a permanent injunction, dramatically limiting Rimini’s longtime support practices, including immediately and permanently discontinuing the use of its automated tools. This was a major part of its software support business model, as 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 further ordered Rimini to delete the infringing software ‘development environments’, which it copied from its computer systems to customers’ computer systems and continued to use for almost 10 years to provide support.

In her 198-page order, the judge 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 the company’s copyright infringement, notice removal, and false advertising.

She stated, “Mr. Ravin materially contributed to and induced Rimini’s infringement of Oracle’s copyrights. Knowingly, he participated in the creation and propagation of Rimini’s false advertising related to its infringing support practices.”

While rejecting Rimini’s sole remaining claim against Oracle, the court ruled that Oracle did not violate the California Unfair Competition Law.

The Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison team included litigation partners Bill Isaacson, Karen Dunn, and Jessica Phillips.