In Oracle’s legal department, the name of the game is copyright infringement.  The software giant sued SAP – which, at least for the time being, did not get it the multi-billion dollar sum it has hoped to win – and the Google case isn’t going anywhere either.

This particular case against Google involves a claim that Android’s virtual machine is infringing Java copyrights, which Oracle gained with the acquisitions of Sun in 2010. There’s a lot of stake here; the sheer scale of the Android ecosystem means that Larry Ellison has a lot to gain, and that Google has a lot to lose.

The details of the legal proceedings and various stages of the trial set to be held in the court of Federal Judge William Alsup have been laid out last month, and yesterday The Register reported the latest twist in the plot. A US Court of Appeals panel decided not to overrule a second decision that allows Oracle to use an email sent by Google developer Tim Lindholm, which is a very notable development considering the  contents of the message. This is what Lindholm wrote:

“What we’ve actually been asked to do (by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome. We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.”

The message has been sent before Oracle began to take legal action against Google, and seems to confirm an acknowledgment of foul play by the latter. The search giant argued that the email is protected under attorney-client privilege, but it was dismissed for the following reason:

“The e-mail’s discussion is directed at a negotiation strategy as opposed [to a legal strategy]. The e-mail does not evidence any sort of infringement or invalidity analysis, wrote Judge Alan Lourie, one of the three members of the panel.