“It” is the $9 billion copyright infringement suit Oracle filed against the search giant nearly 10 years ago. Oracle brought the case in 2010 after Google incorporated 11,500 lines of Oracle’s Java code into Google’s Android platform for smartphones and tablets. Android has since become the world’s most popular operating system, running on more than 2.5 billion devices.
All the apps that sit on our smartphones—like Pandora or Uber—use interfaces to communicate with our phones’ operating systems . If the owner of a platform can claim, through copyright, to own those interfaces, it can limit innovation and competition, Google contends. Not only can it determine who gets to write software on its own platform, but, as we’ll see, it may even be able to prevent rival platforms from ever being written.
“Before Android,” Oracle’s lawyers write in their brief to the Supreme Court, “every company that wanted to use the Java platform took a commercial license...including smartphone manufacturers BlackBerry, Nokia and Danger.” Selden’s widow sued Baker for copyright infringement—and lost. Basically, Justice Joseph Bradley explained in the opinion, she was trying to use copyright to protect the ideas contained in Selden’s book. He explained that, while a patent can protect an idea, a copyright protects only expression—in this case, the particular words Selden used to describe his bookkeeping method.
To decide Oracle’s case, the Supreme Court will have to look closely at exactly what an application program interface is. Such an interface is composed of two key parts. One part is a shorthand label, in effect, that a software developer can write into a program when he wants a certain task performed. That label will call up a much longer, prewritten module of code that will actually supply the step-by-step instructions for accomplishing a task, which the developer won’t have to write himself.
What Google did, according to the computer scientists, “is a long-standing, ubiquitous practice that has been essential to realizing fundamental advances in computing” and “has spurred historic innovation across the software industry for decades.” Then, in 2016, the jury ruled for Google on its fair use defense. The Federal Circuit then overturned that verdict too, in 2018, ruling for Oracle and ordering the case sent back to another jury for calculation of damages.
I like larryellison ... he’s way cooler
Both company names end in 'le'