I don't know the facts in this case. But, speaking hypothetically only, if you hire someone to write code for $300,000 and the code doesn't do what it's supposed to do, the normal damage claim would have been in the ballpark of $300,000. If the jury award is 25 times that much, then there's something else going on.
Of course , there is something going on. The big wad
of money seems to include...
*** Damages for "lost revenue" (the largest portion of the award I believe)
*** Cost of code development
*** Probably all the legal fees .etc etc.
The lost revenue bit seems to be related to the thought
that the sale of a *similar* program by Digium to another
customer in another country (the UK) included a piece of re-purposed code
from this project for the plaintiff's in Alabama US
I would need to know more about the bit of code (JAVA I believe) that
was re-purposed to form an opinion if this was truly specific work product
or basic code re-use. I can't think of any project in my 30 years of programming
that did not involve reaching into my code piles for some pre-existing
code fragments , classes or what have you.
If that code was the plaintiff's secret family recipe for baked beans
that would be one thing, if it was some sort of fairly generic functionality
I would bounce the plaintiff's claim right out of my armchair court.
Personally , having dug around a bit , I think the only profits
the plaintiff would ever have realized were in this court
case anyways. Go ahead , spend a few moments Googling this situation,
and see if you don't notice something truly odd about the plaintiff's
web presence.
While not surprised I am sorta curious how the
development costs reached the $300,000 ballpark on this, as while
the specifications are a little sketchy , this is NOT that complicated
an application. It's not even as complicated as AsterClick, whose
total lifetime project revenues would not even buy the coffee
for this drama. (but that's another thread)
Just the other day I was commenting on the technical
aspects of a very *similar* application being discussed elsewhere
on this forum involving the creation of a mass meetme/conference application,
and I can tell you with some certainty that I would have a hard time
citing a $293,000 price tag while maintaining a straight face.
The bug complaints are sorta telling too. For instance tallying the
number of users participating in the stream was
one of the cited bugs. For licensing of events , I can see this
being something to complain about , but one would not be able to
complain about that unless the actual program was already working.
This particular complaint was one of book keeping and *may* not
have been a totally valid complaint depending upon some minor details.
Of course this case was floated in Alabama , which is not exactly
Silicon valley technologically, so a little razzle dazzle can go a lot
further in the court room when it comes to technology.
Looking at some of the complaints about the "bugs" in the coding
product and whatever else I could gleam , it did indeed seem that
the plaintiff should have gotten a far lower award (if any), so this is
almost certainly going to appeals unless a hallway deal is struck,
and perhaps they'll get a more technically savvy group deciding that appeal.
Most Judgment appeals on this kind of thing seem to
get the award amount reduced.
Anyways , I think this largely a Tempest in a teapot, but it
is a blast to watch folks scurrying around about it
--Doc