Supreme Court Backs Google in Copyright Fight With Oracle (original) (raw)

U.S.|Supreme Court Backs Google in Copyright Fight With Oracle

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/us/google-oracle-supreme-court.html

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The 6-to-2 ruling ended a decade-long battle over whether Google had improperly used Java code in its Android operating system.

The Supreme Court determined that Google’s use of the code was subject to the fair use exception.Credit...Laura Morton for The New York Times

Published April 5, 2021Updated May 3, 2021

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Google in a long-running copyright dispute with Oracle over software used to run most of the world’s smartphones. The 6-to-2 ruling, which resolved what Google had called “the copyright case of the decade,” spared the company from having to face claims from Oracle for billions of dollars in damages.

The case, Google v. Oracle America, No. 18-956, concerned Google’s reliance on aspects of Java, a programming language, in its Android operating system. Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, said that using parts of Java without permission amounted to copyright infringement.

Google responded that free access to the software interfaces in question were crucial to the innovation economy.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority, said that Google was protected by the “fair use” exception to copyright protections.

In 2016, a San Francisco jury found that Google had not violated copyright laws because it had made fair use of the code. But in 2018, a specialized appeals court in Washington, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, disagreed with that assessment.

“There is nothing fair about taking a copyrighted work verbatim and using it for the same purpose and function as the original in a competing platform,” Judge Kathleen M. O’Malley wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.

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