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Larry Page, CEO of Google Inc., right, addresses the media as he arrives in court in San Jose, California, the United States, Monday, September 19, 2011.
Ryan Anson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with Google against Oracle in a long-standing copyright dispute over software used in Android, the mobile operating system.
The court ruling was 6-2. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who had yet to be confirmed by the Senate when the case was debated in October, was not involved in the case.
The case involved approximately 12,000 lines of code used by Google to create Android and copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2010. It was viewed as a landmark dispute over the types of computer code protected by US copyright law.
Oracle had claimed at points that it owed it up to $ 9 billion, while Google claimed its use of the code was covered by the fair use doctrine and therefore was not subject to legal liability. author.
Oracle sued Google for the use of its code and twice won its case in the US Federal Circuit Specialized Court of Appeals, which ruled that Google’s use of the code was not fair use.
The Supreme Court overturned the decision of the court of appeal.
Read more: Justices fear upsetting tech industry in Google-Oracle Supreme Court fight
Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, agreed that Google’s use of the code was protected as fair use, noting that Google took “only what was necessary to enable users to apply their acquired talents to the service of a new and transformative program. “
“Inasmuch as Google used parts of the Sun Java API to create a new platform that could be easily used by programmers, its use was consistent with this creative ‘advancement’ which is the basic constitutional goal. copyright itself, ”Breyer added.
Breyer was accompanied by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were dissenting.
The case, one of the most significant in the term, featured a high-level battle over competing visions for the future of software development.
“The long-established practice of reusing software interfaces is essential to the development of modern software,” Google lawyer veteran Supreme Court attorney Tom Goldstein told the judges during oral argument.
The case was initially scheduled to be heard in the last quarter before being delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is the latest news. Please come back for updates.
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