ReadWriteEnterprise

If you watch only one TED talk this year, you should be sure to watch Rob Reid's talk "The $8 billion iPod."

Reid, the founder of Rhapsody, debuts Copyright Math (TM), the field of study "based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists." In that time, Reid completely skewers the entertainment industry's inflated claims of damages that result from copyright infringement.

It will amount to being publicly shamed, and although Oracle gave SAP an escape hatch, it purposely made that hatch too small to crawl though. In a deal announced yesterday, SAP is likely to plead guilty on behalf of its former customer support unit, TomorrowNow (TN), on charges that it stole Oracle's intellectual property in an effort to support Oracle customers who were also TN clients.

The fresh set of charges was, according to multiple press sources, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco yesterday. (A copy of the filing was not yet available at press time.) The sole defendant in this new set of charges is TomorrowNow, shifting the shame over to the SAP subsidiary, although it will still be SAP that is liable for damages.

The changes in U.S. copyright law over the past three years affect the way damages are assessed. When a party is found guilty of infringement of copyright (which runs deeper than mere violation), the test now is the extent to which the infringed party is less able to license its intellectual property than it had planned back before it was infringed.

In other words, if you weren't going to sell something in the first place, you can't claim lost sales. That's what SAP argued after a jury awarded Oracle a record $1.3 billion, after finding SAP guilty of copyright infringement for tapping into Oracle's servers for product support data. Today, a federal court judge struck down that verdict, stating it didn't match the circumstances.