The Android copyright dispute between Google and Oracle is still dragging on, and now the search giant has asked the US Supreme Court to hear the case.
While the case may have started as yet another attempt by a power player to limit the mobile dominance of Google, it now threatens to have far broader implications for all software developers, since it hinges on the issue of whether APIs (application programming interfaces) can be copyrighted.
When Oracle filed suit in 2011, accusing Google of infringing Java patents and copyright in Android and its own Java virtual machine, it was seen as an attempt to enhance the power of Oracle’s own Java platform in the mobile world, rather than letting Google entirely dominate smartphone software. Although Oracle initially welcomed Java-based Android, it then emerged that Google would not use the default Oracle JVM, but devise its own, Dalvik (now replaced with ART).
That weakened the influence of Oracle, which had presumably hoped to replicate the importance of Java in the featurephone generation, in the new era of smartphones with apps and full operating systems. Oracle hit back, claiming patent infringement and – more importantly, as it turned out – that some of the APIs used in Dalvik were subject to copyright.
In the 2012 trial, Google largely prevailed, even though the jury ruled that Google had infringed some Oracle copyright. The copyright element of the case (the patents issues were heard separately) revolved around Oracle’s allegations that its rival copied the structure and organization of the Java APIs, partly to make it easier for existing Java developers to write for Android. That meant Oracle was owed “billions of dollars” in licensing fees, the firm said.
Google responded with claims of fair usage – based on the idea that APIs could not be copyrighted because they are required to write compatible programs. If they were copyrighted, that would limit developers’ freedom to innovate, and to create alternatives to Oracle’s own Java technologies.
The lower court largely agreed with this but its ruling was reversed by an appeals court in May, which said APIs should be protected in the same way as any other creative works.
Now the central issue of copyright could reach the US’s highest authority. Google filed a request for the Supreme Court to hear the case earlier this week and Oracle has until November 7 to respond. “Early computer companies could have blocked vast amounts of technological development by claiming 95-year copyright monopolies over the basic building blocks of computer design and programming,” Google wrote in its filing, quoted by Reuters.