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Supreme Court Leaves As Many Questions As It Answers In 'Google v. Oracle'
On April 5, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a copyright case that left as many questions as it gave answers, in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 141 S.Ct. 1183 (2021). In a lengthy decision, the Court cleared Google of copyright infringement in terminating a 16-year long dispute as to whether Google's Android mobile platform had infringed Oracle's Java programming language's copyright. A 6-2 panel (Justice Barrett did not participate) found in favor of Google, holding that its use the copied code constituted fair use. However, the Court did not answer the question of whether specific components of computer software qualifies for copyright protection at all.
|Google v. Oracle Factual Background
The dispute started in 2005 when Google first acquired Android, Inc. and its operating system for mobile devices. Shortly after acquiring Android, Google began talks with Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) to license the Java platform for new smartphone technology. At the time, Java was understood by many developers and as many as six million programmers had spent time learning and using Java. However, Sun insisted that Java programs be "interoperable," or able to be run on any device regardless of the underlying hardware. When Google and Sun could not reach an agreement on the interoperability of programs made for Android, negotiations broke down.
For three years, approximately 100 Google engineers worked to create Google's Android software writing millions of lines of new code. Because Google wanted programmers familiar with Java to be able to write software for Android, Google also copied roughly 11,500 lines of code from the "Java SE" program's Application Programming Interface (API). The API was a tool that allowed programmers to use prewritten code to build certain functions into new programs rather than write new lines of code from scratch. In creating Android's API, Google copied 37 packages verbatim from the Java API.
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