Oracle 2013 Annual Report Download - page 31

Table of Contents
services were to decrease. There can be no assurance that we will be successful in maintaining, expanding or developing our relationships with
channel participants. If we are not successful, we may lose sales opportunities, customers and revenues.
We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights. We rely on copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret laws, confidentiality
procedures, controls and contractual commitments to protect our intellectual property rights. Despite our efforts, these protections may be
limited. Unauthorized third parties may try to copy or reverse engineer portions of our products or otherwise obtain and use our intellectual
property. Any patents owned by us may be invalidated, circumvented or challenged. Any of our pending or future patent applications, whether or
not being currently challenged, may not be issued with the scope of the claims we seek, if at all. In addition, the laws of some countries do not
provide the same level of protection of our intellectual property rights as do the laws and courts of the United States. If we cannot protect our
intellectual property rights against unauthorized copying or use, or other misappropriation, we may not remain competitive.
Third parties have claimed and, in the future, may claim infringement or misuse of intellectual property rights and/or breach of license
agreement provisions. We periodically receive notices from, or have lawsuits filed against us by, others claiming infringement or other
misuse of their intellectual property rights and/or breach of our agreements with them. These third parties include entities that do not have the
capabilities to design, manufacture, or distribute products or services or that acquire intellectual property like patents for the sole purpose of
monetizing their acquired intellectual property through asserting claims of infringement and misuse. We expect the number of such claims will
increase as:
Responding to any such claim, regardless of its validity, could:
We may lose key employees or may be unable to hire enough qualified employees. We rely on the continued service of our senior
management, including our Chief Executive Officer and founder, members of our executive team and other key employees and the hiring of new
qualified employees. In the technology industry, there is substantial and continuous competition for highly skilled business, product
development, technical and other personnel. In addition, acquisitions could cause us to lose key personnel of the acquired companies or at
Oracle. We may also experience increased compensation costs that are not offset by either improved productivity or higher sales. We may not be
successful in recruiting new personnel and in retaining and motivating existing personnel. With rare exceptions, we do not have long-term
employment or non-competition agreements with our employees. Members of our senior management team have left Oracle over the years for a
variety of reasons, and we cannot assure you that there will not be additional departures, which may be disruptive to our operations.
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we continue to acquire companies and expand into new businesses;
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the number of products and competitors in our industry segments grows;
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the use and support of third party code (including open source code) becomes more prevalent in the industry;
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the volume of issued patents continues to increase; and
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the proliferation of non
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practicing entities asserting intellectual property infringement claims increases.
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be time consuming, costly and result in litigation;
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divert management
’
s time and attention from developing our business;
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require us to pay monetary damages or enter into royalty and licensing agreements that we would not normally find acceptable;
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require us to stop selling or to redesign certain of our products;
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require us to release source code to third parties, possibly under open source license terms;
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require us to satisfy indemnification obligations to our customers; or;
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otherwise adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition or cash flows.