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FILE PHOTO: Illuminated Google logo appears in an office building in Zurich, Switzerland, December 5, 2018. REUTERS / Arnd Wiegmann / File Photo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The US Supreme Court on Monday urged the Trump administration to give its opinion on Google's opposition to an end to the Oracle Corp lawsuit over the Android operating system, which most smartphones in the world.
Judges are investigating the possibility of appealing Google as part of a lower court decision that reactivated the lawsuit. Oracle has claimed about $ 9 billion in damages.
A jury authorized Google in 2016, but the US Court of Appeals of the federal circuit in Washington, which specializes in intellectual property litigation, overturned this decision in 2018, concluding that Google was using the code of the Oracle software in an unacceptable way in Android according to the American copyright law.
The case, which could help define the level of copyright protection of software, dates back to 2010, when San Francisco federal court was sued, accusing Google of harming its business by copying thousands Lines of computer code from its widely used Java programming language. license in order to do Android. Google, a member of Alphabet Inc., said that an Oracle win would curb software innovation.
The case has been swept from the beginning, Google having lost twice to the Federal Circuit. In 2014, this court overturned a federal judge's decision that Oracle's interfaces could not be protected by copyright.
Last year, the Federal Circuit rejected Google's argument that its use of Oracle's "application programming interfaces" was permitted under the so-called "fair use" doctrine of the 1976 Law on copyright because, by adapting them to a mobile platform, it transformed them into a new one.
The Supreme Court sometimes asks the president's administration to decide whether to deal with a particular case. In 2015, the court dismissed a call from Google in this case after the Justice Department led by President Barack Obama had recommended not to hear it.
The judges did not give the justice department of President Donald Trump the deadline for his response to the case.
Report by Andrew Chung; Edited by Will Dunham
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