Rimini Street and its owner urged the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday to vacate an injunction blocking it from copying Oracle’s software in their 14-year battle over Rimini’s software patches. They argued that the lower court erroneously dismissed certain infringement defenses and made other errors.
Mark Andrew Perry of Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP, representing Rimini Street Inc. and its owner Seth Ravin, told a three-judge panel that the lower court made two significant legal errors at the pleading stage early in the litigation. These errors barred Rimini from asserting certain IP defenses, which Perry argued should have been considered throughout the case. He urged the appellate court to review these rulings “de novo,” or without deference to the lower court’s decision.
Perry argued that the trial court erred by barring Rimini from arguing that its software patches were not derivative works, emphasizing that derivative works must incorporate protected expression from another copyrighted work, whereas Rimini’s software is entirely new code. He also contended that the district court wrongly struck Rimini’s statutory defense under the Copyright Act, which allows lawful copying of a computer program as “an essential step in the utilization of the computer program” or for “archival purposes.”
