Google asks Supreme Court to decide Oracle's Android copyright case

The four-year-old legal battle between Google and Oracle over Google's use of Java in its Android operating system could end up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Google emerged largely victorious from a lower court trial but an appeals court overturned that ruling in May. Google now wants the highest court in the U.S. to hear its case.
 Google’s Android has become the most widely used and best-selling smartphone operating system, but Oracle says Google copied basic elements of Java to develop the most popular OS. It filed its lawsuit against Google four years ago in 2010 and was seeking $1 billion in damages for its copyright claims. Oracle says Google copied the structure and organization of the Java APIs (application programming interfaces), in part so that developers already familiar with Java would find it easier to write programs for Android.
 What the appeals court found in the Oracle v. Google case was that the declaration code in Oracle's API packages, which Google copied verbatim, was copyrightable. John T. Kennedy, an attorney at Dorsey & Whitney specializing in patent litigation, prosecution, and licensing, told ADTmag in an earlier interview that the Oracle code had not merged with the functions performed by the code; that combinations of short code phrases, such as those used in the APIs, can be copyrightable; and the fact that the code serves a function does not preclude its copyright-ability if, as the court put it, "the author had multiple ways to express the underlying idea" at the time of creation of the code."
"Whether an alleged copier has multiple ways to perform a function was also found to be not relevant to the copyright-ability of such code," Kennedy said, "but, might arise as a fair use defence. In a nutshell, since the functions performed by the Oracle APIs at the time of their creation could have been achieved by code 'written and organized in any number of ways' Oracle's code is copyrightable."
Google argued that the APIs should not be protected by copyright because they are required to write compatible programs. The lower court agreed, but the appeals court sided with Oracle and said APIs are creative works that deserve protection like any other. The search and advertising giant filed its request for the Supreme Court to hear the case earlier but Google’s filing was not immediately available on the Supreme Court’s website.