Larry Page, CEO of Google Inc., right, speaks to the media when he arrived at the court in San Jose, California, USA, on Monday, September 19, 2011.
Ryan Anson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Google against Oracle in a lengthy copyright dispute over software used on Android, the mobile operating system.
The court’s decision was 6-2. Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who was not yet confirmed by the Senate when the case was argued in October, did not participate in the case.
The case concerned about 12,000 lines of code that Google used to build Android that were copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. It was seen as a controversy over what types of computer code are protected. American copyright law.
Oracle had claimed that up to $ 9 billion was owed to it, while Google claimed that the use of the code was covered by the doctrine of legitimate use.
Oracle sued Google for using its code and won its case twice before the U.S. specialized appellate court for the federal circuit. The Supreme Court overturned the decision of the appellate court.
Read more: Judges wary of tech industry alert in Oracle Supreme Court fight against Google
Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, agreed that Google’s use of the code was protected by fair use.
“We conclude that in this case, in which Google reimplemented a user interface, taking only what is necessary to allow users to work on their accumulated talents in a new and transformative program, Google’s copy of the ‘Sun Java API was a fair use of this material as a matter of law,’ Breyer wrote.
Breyer was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Magistrates Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito disagreed.
The case, one of the most significant in the term, featured 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 attorney veteran Supreme Court attorney Tom Goldstein told attorneys during the arguments.
The case was initially scheduled to be heard last quarter before it was delayed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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