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The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Google in a legal battle with Oracle, a decision that could free developers to build on each other’s products.
Tech firms sighed with relief Monday after the Supreme Court sided with Google in a copyright dispute with Oracle (Google LLC vs. Oracle America Inc., 18-956).
The high court said Google did nothing wrong in copying code to develop the Android operating system on most smartphones.
To create Android, which was released in 2007, Google wrote millions of new computer code lines. It also used about 11,500 lines of code copyrighted as part of Oracle’s Java platform. Oracle had sued, seeking billions.
However, Supreme Court sided 6-2 with Google, describing the copying as “fair use.”
It’s widely speculated that the outcome is what most tech companies — both large and small — had been rooting for. Both Microsoft and IBM were among the industry heavyweights that had filed briefs backing Google in the case.
Many tech companies warned that ruling against the search engine brand could have profound consequences, stifling innovation and upending software development.
Oracle had won backing from the movie and recording industries as well as publishers, which favor expansive copyright protections to protect their profits from books, articles, movies, TV shows, and music.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that Google “took only what was needed” and that “Google’s copying was transformative,” a word the court has used “to describe a copying use that adds something new and important.”
Google had said its actions were long-settled, standard practice in the industry, a practice that has been good for technical progress.
The company spokesman further said there is no copyright protection for the purely functional, noncreative computer code it used, something that couldn’t be written another way.
The case has been going on for a decade. Google won the first round when a judge rejected Oracle’s copyright claim, but that ruling was overturned on appeal.
A jury then sided with Google, but an appeals court again disagreed.
Breyer wrote that in reviewing the lower court’s decision, the justices assumed “for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable.”
Justice Breyer wrote: “But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law.”
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Samuel Alito that “Oracle’s code at issue here is copyrightable, and Google’s use of that copyrighted code was anything but fair.”
Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, said, “Victory for consumers, interoperability, and computer science.
The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers.”
On the other hand, Oracle’s chief legal officer, Dorian Daley, condemned the outcome by saying: “The Google platform just got bigger and market power greater. The barriers to entry higher and the ability to compete lower. They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can.”
Oracle’s dogged pursuit of a case had been widely derided by other technology companies as a gross misapplication of copyright law.
A consortium of other tech companies argued it threatened to make it more difficult for different computer programs to work together and could stifle innovation among startups that might not be able to pay royalties for a few strands of coding.
The founder of Privacy Lab at Yale Law School, Sean O’Brien, said both amateur and professional software developers will now “sleep a little easier without worrying that innovation and collaboration would be handcuffed by new restrictions.”
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a major trade group, was among the technology voices celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision.
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