In addition to providing a platform to serve our licensing clients with greater efficiency, a significant factor in our decision to leave behind BigLaw and embrace the emerging world of GigLaw was the ability to freely explore issues that bear on our industry and share them with our friends and colleagues in a proactive manner.
And, make no mistake, publishing is crucial to Beeman & Muchmore’s mandate to provide clarity and comfort to Oracle licensees. Oracle licensing and auditing presents the threat that it does primarily through isolation of the licensee – the more in the dark the licensee is to Oracle’s Audit Script, the more imposing an Oracle audit appears. By virtue of our years of representing clients against Oracle in contentious licensing and auditing disputes, we have developed a valuable trove of information and experience that can be difficult to ascertain from public records. This is the experience we bring to our clients on a daily basis through our representations and, always mindful of confidentiality obligations, the experience we try to share with our friends and colleagues through our blog posts and industry publications.
True to our mantra, since our launch in June of 2020, we have written dozens of blog posts on various topics within the software licensing and auditing space, many directly related to Oracle Corporation. Relying on our knowledge, over the last several months, many of our clients and colleagues have been asking us about the bewildering Oracle/TikTok/Trump saga. Initially, we did some background research for our ITAM podcast with LicenseFortress and, based on that research, we were intrigued by just how deep those waters appeared to run.
Satisfying our own curiosity, we wrote an in-depth 4-part series titled “From Mars v. Oracle to ‘Techlash’ & from Trump to TikTok: What is Oracle Up to and What Does It Mean for Its Licensees?”
We are now delighted to share the news that on January 20th, 2021, Law360 published a consolidation of these posts in an article titled “What the Oracle-TikTok Saga Means for Oracle Licensees”. We have admired the efforts of Law360 for decades and are honored to, once again, have our efforts associated with that institutional publication. (See also "The Oracle Audit: Lessons from the Only Licensee Suit".)
Many thanks to the efforts of Law360 staff in helping us streamline our sprawling posts into a (hopefully) coherent whole, and we hope you enjoy.
* * * * *
It is well-known within the Cloud industry that Oracle has long been lagging behind in the 'Cloud Wars', and our article explores the recent events surrounding Oracle's ongoing strategy for cloud relevance. In it, we consider the ways in which Oracle intended the acquisition of TikTok to be a strategy for becoming relevant in the Cloud world and suggest what this means for the Oracle licensee.
If you are a Law360 subscriber, you may access the article here. Otherwise, you may link to our website to view the article.
Published on 2/1/2021
Software licensors are known for vague contracts—they’ve made a business of it.
Read the latest industry news.
