As a very long-running saga nears its end, Google has won a major victory over Oracle in the US Supreme Court, which has ruled that the search giant did not violate a key Java patent – owned by Oracle courtesy of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 – in Android.
Oracle originally sued Google over Java copyright and patents in 2010 and there have been many hearings since, with Google losing a major round in the battle in 2018. The scope of the legal action has been reduced over time – the first lawsuits covered seven patents and a copyright claim, but by 2012 the case centered on copyright for 37 Java APIs, consisting of less than 12,000 lines of code.
The potential fall-out on the wider industry has also become far less significant over time. Initially the legal action raised very important issues of how open technology should be licensed, whether APIs could be copyrighted, and even whether Android would survive. But Android is reworked on an ongoing basis, so offending code has no doubt been worked around, and the battle has become of somewhat esoteric interest to copyright lawyers.
But Google will feel vindicated to have won this victory, after a heavy defeat in 2018. The Supreme Court judged that Google did not violate patents when using the Java SE language to build Android, but more widely, its ruling indicates that copyright law could be applied differently to software code than other content.
The Court made its decision on a 6-2 basis, and ruled that Google’s use of around 11,500 lines of Java SE (Standard Edition) code as part of Android was “fair use”. It noted that this code, and the APIs that used it, made up just 0.4% of the entire Java code base.
“Google’s copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the ruling.
Breyer also said that “to allow enforcement of Oracle’s copyright here would risk harm to the public” because so many programmers had used the code, and that had led to a whole new ecosystem. Enforcement would turn this code into “a lock limiting the future creativity of new programs” in which “Oracle alone would hold the key”.
Google has avoided more than $8bn in damages that Oracle was seeking, and some sources had predicted that damages could run to $20bn or even $30bn.
“The Google platform just got bigger and market power greater – the barriers to entry higher and the ability to compete lower,” responded Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley in a statement. “They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can. This behavior is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices.”
Forrester Research senior analyst David Mooter commented that the court “noted that computer code, unlike books and movies, has a functional purpose that creates a public interest unique from all other copyrightable media. This allowed the court to define a fair use precedent for computer code that seems to be more lenient than other media.”