Google wins in $8 billion copyright dispute against Oracle

Google wins in its court battle against Oracle based on the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that was handed down on Monday, April 5. The Alphabet subsidiary has been involved in a copyright dispute with the California-headquartered software company since 2010.

Why Google and Oracle end up in court

The case started when Oracle sued Google and filed in San Francisco federal court. Oracle was seeking $8.8 billion in damages after arguing that the Java programming language's application programming interfaces (APIs) owned by Oracle were used on Google’s Android operating system. The software company insisted the APIs used were copyrightable, so there was an infringement violation.

As mentioned in Associated Press News, to make Android that was launched in 2007, Google wrote millions of lines of new computer code. However, it also included 11,330 lines of code that are from Oracle's Java platform. Google admitted it did use the APIs but stated that it was within the fair use policy.

Two district courts ruled in Google’s favor, but the Federal Circuit court overturned the decisions, saying the APIs' use, in this case, does not fall under fair use.

Google’s appeal at the Supreme Court

In 2018, Google appealed the ruling, and the case was brought to the Supreme Court. The case was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally, this week, the Supreme Court ruled that Google’s use of Oracle’s Java APIs was within the scope of fair use. The votes for this ruling were 6-2 and effectively overruled the Federal Circuit’s decision.

The justices ruled 6-2 in favor of Google, and two conservative justices dissented. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the decision that the justices at the Federal Circuit made the decision "for argument's sake, that the material was copyrightable."

He added, "But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use, hence, Google's copying did not violate the copyright law."

On the other hand, in dissent with Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., 18-956 case, "Oracle's code at issue here is copyrightable, and Google's use of that copyrighted code was anything but fair."