Posts Tagged: "Google v. Oracle"

In two months, the Supreme Court will hear the oral argument in the long-running Google v. Oracle software copyright case. At issue is the availability of copyright protection for computer programs and in particular the copyright protection of code in Oracle’s Java platform, which Google admits it copied for its Android operating system without obtaining a license. Google also claims its commercial use of that code in competition with Oracle is protected under copyright law’s fair use doctrine, but that is a subject for another day. If adopted by the Supreme Court, Google’s arguments would undermine the Constitutional purposes and specific Congressional intent in enacting the Copyright Act, and along with them the fundamental incentives for new creative expression in software, a building block of so many consumer and industrial products. To better understand how, it helps to start at the beginning: Apple’s groundbreaking release of the iPhone.

On January 6, 2020, Google submitted its brief in Google v. Oracle, kicking off the Supreme Court case that many are calling the “copyright case of the decade.” The suit pits the search engine platform controlling 93% of the worldwide search market against Oracle, the owner of the ubiquitous Java program, which submitted its response brief last week. After attempting and failing to secure the rights to Java, Google decided to cease negotiating and instead replicated 37 API packages from the copyrighted program, a decision that precipitated the years-long lawsuit. 

Google v. Oracle America, a case pending before the United States Supreme Court, is a seemingly never-ending battle, since 2010, between two Silicon Valley behemoths. But now that battle may finally be nearing its conclusion. On January 7, the first of the amicus briefs were filed, signaling that both sides are marshaling their arguments for one final push toward the…

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court invited the United States Solicitor General to file a brief expressing its views in the long-running case of Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc. The case highlights the complexities of protecting software via IP rights. As with patents, the courts often struggle to apply copyright concepts to software, leaving companies bleeding time and resources. Determining what can be protected and what can’t be is complex—even for appellate courts.“ These software piracy cases are convoluted because there can be both literal and nonliteral copying, as shown by the Google v. Oracle case,” said Brian Darville, chair of the trademark and copyright practice group at Oblon. “It’s critical for companies to legally safeguard their software and ensure they’re not infringing on their competitors.”

Mozilla, Mapbox, Medium, Patreon, Etsy, and Wikimedia have filed an amicus brief in support of Google in its case against Oracle at the U.S Supreme Court. The platforms disagree with the Federal Circuit’s March 27, 2018, ruling that Google’s use of Oracle’s Java application programming interface (API packages) was not fair as a matter of law, reversing the district court’s decision on the matter. The brief is the latest of 14 that have been filed in the last week in support of granting the petition.

Following a Federal Circuit ruling last March in which Google lost the latest in a nine-year battle with Oracle over Google’s unauthorized use of nine lines of code and 37 packages of Oracle’s Java API packages in its Android operating system, Google has once again petitioned the Supreme Court to step in.