Larry Page, CEO of Google Inc., right, speaks to the media as he arrives at court in San Jose, California, USA on Monday, September 19, 2011.
Ryan Anson | Bloomberg | Getty images
On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with Google against Oracle in a long-running copyright dispute over the software used in Android, the mobile operating system.
The court decision was 6-2. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate when the case was advocated in October, did not participate in the case.
The case involved approximately 12,000 lines of code that Google used to build Android copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. It was seen as a milestone in the types of computer code protected under US copyright law.
Oracle had claimed on certain points that it owed a whopping $ 9 billion, while Google claimed that use of the code was under the doctrine of fair use.
Oracle sued Google for using its code and twice won its case in the specialized US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court has reversed the decision of the court of appeal.
Read more: Judges are wary of lifting the tech industry in the battle between Google and Oracle Supreme Court
Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, agreed that Google’s use of the code was protected under fair use.
“We come to the conclusion that in this case, where Google has redeployed a user interface, taking only what was necessary to enable users to put their accumulated talents to work in a new and transformative program, Google the Sun Java API had made reasonable use of that material as a matter of law, ‘Breyer wrote.
Breyer was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were of the opinion.
The case, one of the most important of the term, involved a high-profile battle over competing visions of the future of software development.
“The long-established practice of reusing software interfaces is critical to modern software development,” Google’s attorney, veteran Supreme Court attorney Tom Goldstein, told the judges during arguments.
The case was originally scheduled to be heard last parliamentary term before being postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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