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The Supreme Court’s recent landmark ruling in Google v. Oracle ended a decade-long legal battle between the tech giants, finding that Google’s copying of over 11,000 lines of Oracle’s Sun Java application programming interface (“API”) code was permissible fair use under copyright law. This ruling means that Google won’t have to pay billions of dollars in damages to Oracle. It also has huge implications for the broader software and tech industries.
While the Supreme Court was presented with two questions– first, whether APIs can be copyrighted and second, whether Google’s use of the Oracle’s Java API constituted fair use– the majority opinion declined to address the question of copyrightability. Recognizing the “rapidly changing technological, economic, and business-related circumstances,” the high court put aside the larger question to instead focus on resolving the dispute at hand, assuming for argument’s sake that the Sun Java API falls within the definition of copyrightable material.