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Finding Google’s copying a fair use, the Supreme Court ended Oracle’s decade-long attempt to recover copyright damages. The battle began between these tech giants when Google designed its Android software platform for mobile devices, such as smartphones. The platform allows “computer programmers to develop new programs and applications” for Android-based devices. In designing the mobile platform, Google independently developed most of the code but copied what the parties referred to as “declaring code” for 37 application programming interfaces, or APIs. The declaring code in APIs “enables a set of shortcuts for programmers.” A programmer can select a particular task from the API’s task library without having to learn anything more than a simple command, thus allowing the programmer to use a library of prewritten code to carry out complex tasks without having to write the code from scratch.
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Court finds that Google s re-use of code from Oracle s Java API constitutes fair use under the Copyright Act
On April 5, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.,
1 a long-awaited case addressing the boundaries of the copyright fair use defense as it applies to computer code. This is the first time the Court has addressed fair use in 28 years. It issued a resounding opinion in favor of innovation that dramatically changes how courts will analyze fair use with respect to computer software going forward.
Oracle v Google decision reflects the reality of how the software industry works, claims Lemley
After years of litigation, SCOTUS has ruled that Google’s use of the Sun Java API in Android constituted fair use in a decision that might have been celebrated by large parts of high-tech but which may cause concern in content-heavy creative industries.
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It’s okay to duplicate an API, even if you have to snarf 11,500 lines of somebody else’s code to do it. That’s the gist of the ruling from the United States Supreme Court in the long-running case of Google v. Oracle. Left unanswered is the larger question of whether software is even protected by copyright…
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In a narrowly drawn, yet significant decision, the Supreme Court
reversed the Federal Circuit and ruled that Google LLC s
( Google ) copying of some of the Sun Java Application
Programming Interface (API) declaring code was a fair use as a
matter of law, ending Oracle America Inc. s
( Oracle ) infringement claims over Google s use of
portions of the Java API code in the Android mobile platform. (
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.,
No. 18-956, 593 U.S. (Apr. 5, 2021)). In reversing the
2018 Federal Circuit decision that found