Do you get paid to blog on given topics? You may be forced to reveal such arrangements. The judge hearing the Google/Oracle case has ordered the two companies to reveal the names of reporters, bloggers and other commentators they have paid. This demand comes following the intellectual property lawsuit between Google and Oracle over Android and whether that operating system infringed on Java. The judge said in his ruling that he's concerned that payments to bloggers and reporters by either Google or Oracle could have influenced the analysis published in the public sphere, and that the information would be useful to an appeal hearing. The firms have until Aug 17 to respond.
For example Florian Mueller, a patent consultant based in Germany, revealed on 18 April that Oracle had "very recently become a consulting client", two days after the court case began.
www.bbc.com/news/technology-19181172
