Pretty much the only legal battles you hear about are the disasters. 98% of federal cases are resolved without a trial.[1] And my guess is that for every federa

Pretty much the only legal battles you hear about are the disasters. 98% of federal cases are resolved without a trial.[1] And my guess is that for every federal case that even gets filed and settled, there are lots of legal disputes that never even reach that point. So what you're seeing here is the small fraction of a small fraction where both parties were super committed to their position and one party learned they were wrong the hard way. Those ones aren't pretty. But we kind of need them, because they set the precedents that all the other disputes are resolved under. For example, it will be a lot harder to claim that APIs are protected by copyright now, and that will have an impact on all kinds of disputes that never reach a courtroom. I mean, I pretty much agree with you -- it's totally true that lawsuits are miserable things to be part of, and are often hard to salvage any value from for the parties. Do what you can to avoid them -- work with people you trust, write your contracts explicitly and carefully so everyone's on the same page and everything's in writing, and do your best to settle disputes through mediation, where you can make the pie bigger instead of watching lawyers fight over their slice. But also remember that what those lawyers and judges and juries are doing in the disaster cases is negotiating the boundaries of the society we want to live in. In this case, the boundaries were improved by the process. So it might not be such a bad thing -- other than for Oracle. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuit