The long running legal battle between Oracle and Google over alleged infringement, by Android, of some Java code from Sun (which Oracle acquired), has reared its head again. This an unwelcome development in smartphone software circles, where it was thought the affair had been settled after a second jury trial completed in 2016. This reached a straightforward conclusion, that an application programming interface (API) is not copyrightable, so the case against Google was dismissed. What Google had done was to embed 37 separate API calls to Java programming in Android – having decided not to use Sun’s Java implementation for its mobile operating system, but to adopt its own variation, Dalvik (which has since been replaced). In the past, such…