Earlier Oracle had claimed $9 billion which is roughly INR 60,350 crores in damages from Google.
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The outcome of the court battle has been watched closely by other software developers.
The case is not yet closed as Oracle said that it will appeal the decision. “Oracle brought this lawsuit to put a stop to Google’s illegal behavior”, Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley in a statement issued following the verdict.
In the first trial in 2012, the jury reached a mixed verdict leading Judge William Alsup to rule that APIs aren’t copyrightable. If Oracle had won the case the next phase of the trial would have been a “damages phase” to figure out how much Google would be required to pay.
Google uses Java in its Android smartphone operating system which powers about 80% of the world’s mobile devices.
They have ruled that Google’s Android operating system does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights, because the re-implementation of Java’s 37 API’s by Google is protected by “fair use”.
Oracle bought out the company that originally developed Java, Sun Microsystems, in 2010.
Google lawyer Bob Van Nest said he was “grateful for the jury’s verdict”.
But jurors sided with Google’s argument that its use of Oracle’s code was “fair use”, an exemption of copyright law that’s typically invoked to allow critics and artists to quote or reuse small parts of others’ works under certain conditions, such as parodying them.
It then sent the case back to the district court to decide whether Google’s use of the APIs was fair.
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“The Google verdict is an an important validation of the idea that developing interoperable software need not require permission or a license”. It stated in an e-mail that the victory is good for the Android ecosystem, Java programmers, and software developers who use open/free programming languages, according to Ars Technica. This is a big blow to Oracle, which spent millions on this legal fight in an attempt to make money from Google’s extremely successful mobile platform. “We believe there are numerous grounds for appeal and we plan to bring this case back to the federal circuit on appeal”.
