Oracle Corp. yesterday said it intends to significantly expand its trade secrets theft lawsuit against SAP AG, a move that Oracle said will require the scheduled trial date in the case to be pushed back by a year.
Oracle, in documents filed in U.S. District Court, said it will amend its original complaint against SAP — filed in March 2007 — with an expanded complaint alleging “a pattern of unlawful conduct that is different from, and even more serious than, the mass downloading that was the primary focus of the [first complaint].”
Specifically, the Oracle filing says, “It appears that SAP AG and SAP America knew — at executive levels — of the likely illegality of [SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow’s] business model from the time of their acquisition of [TomorrowNow] and, for business reasons, failed to change it.” The filing does not identify SAP AG and SAP Americas executives who supposedly knew about the alleged illegal business model.
In addition, the Oracle filing states, recent discovery has uncovered information that TomorrowNow “relied on the theft and use of infringing copies of Oracle’s underlying software applications, not just the mass-downloaded Oracle support materials.” The filing asserts that TomorrowNow “warehoused these copied software applications as ‘generic software environments’ and used them as a ‘sandbox’ to service other customers, train its employees, and create fake ‘SAP’ branded fixes, updates, and related documentation for distribution. Through this process,” Oracle’s filing alleges, TomorrowNow “made thousands of copies of Oracle’s software and distributed thousands of infringing fixes, updates, and related copyrighted documents.”