joi/flickrA California jury decided in favor of Google, finding that the company did not violate copyrights held by Oracle by using Java APIs (a tool for building Java apps) when designing the Android operating system.
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The case took some seriously unusual twists and turns: A jury in 2012 ruled in Oracle’s favor.
The case went before a jury after the Supreme Court, at the urging of the Obama administration, declined to reconsider an appeals court ruling in favor of Oracle.
The company says it will appeal against the decision. In court, Oracle claimed that Android has produced $31 billion in sales and $22 billion in profit since 2008, a number that Google disputes. They built Android from scratch, using new Google technology, and adapted technology from open sources.
Google won the first round in 2012, when the San Francisco District Court ruled that the Java APIs were not entitled to copyright. Oracle is going to run through Google and Sun internal e-mails about how licensing was required, part of a failed negotiation between the companies that took place before Android was launched.
It isn’t clear how much Oracle would have asked for in the damages phase, but it could have been as much as $9 billion. The company said “there are numerous grounds” for an appeal.
Shares of Oracle and Alphabet were little-changed in after-hours trade following the verdict.
Google said in a statement the verdict “represents a win for the Android ecosystem, for the Java programming community, and for software developers who rely on open and free programming language”.
Google described the declaring code as nothing more than functional components it needed to call resources and make the Java programming language more effective. “Judge Alsup sensibly ruled that the names and organization of the methods in the 37 Java API packages were not protected by copyright, because functional aspects of software aren’t supposed to be protected by copyright”.
During the case before U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, Google argued that Sun Microsystems, which created Java in the 1990s long before it was bought by Oracle, had no problem with Google using the code without a license.
Public interest and industry groups hailed the verdict as a win for the software makers and technology innovators.
Ochoa said the court’s decision overturning that ruling was “an aberration”, and out of step with the past two decades of software copyright law.
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Either company could appeal the decision, so the case likely won’t be over, no matter the outcome.
