Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google (bloomberg.com)

Google could owe Oracle billions of dollars after an appeals court said it didn't have the right to use the Oracle-owned Java programming code in its Android operating system on mobile devices. From a report: Google's use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle's copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled. The case was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet unit should pay.

The dispute is over pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIs, which can work across different types of devices and provide the instructions for things like connecting to the internet or accessing certain types of files. By using the APIs, programmers don't have to write new code from scratch to implement every function in their software or change it for every type of device. The case has divided Silicon Valley for years, testing the boundaries between the rights of those who develop interface code and those who rely on it to develop software programs.

Comments

Re:I gotta believe this is hurting Oracle

[MightyMartian]

No, the world won't. The amount of infrastructure built on top of Java is pretty staggering, and much of the world will continue to use Java.

Re:Why is this wrong?

[jonsmirl]

IANAL but I think this decision is pretty binary - Alsop originally ruled that APIs could not be copyright. Oracle forced him to change that ruling to API could be copyright but cloning them is fair use. But now Oracle is trying to reverse the fair use ruling by the jury.

If that happens all APIs will be under copyright and the only way to clone them will be with a license. And since those copyrights are going to get constructed retroactively since the dawn of computers the only possible outcome is total legal chaos.

Re:I gotta believe this is hurting Oracle

[MrDozR]

And the amount of server-side legacy code being replaced by Java is staggering. Legacy code is considered obsolete, and is being replaced just about everywhere it exists. I don't work in the cable industry. The amount of code that's being refactored towards Java is in, and of itself, mind blowing.

Re:Why is this wrong?

[ooloorie]

Sure Google may have just used the API and written the underlying implementation, but think about it - most languages these days are only powerful because of extensive libraries and API's.

But that value of an API is created not by the company that created the APIs but by the companies that invest their time and money in using the APIs.

In the case of Sun/Oracle, there are three additional factors to consider: (1) Sun achieved rapid and widespread adoption of Java's APIs by falsely claiming that they would make those APIs an open standard; that is, Java APIs would not have succeeded in the market if Sun had been clear from the beginning that they would not allow compatible third party implementations; (2) large parts of the Java APIs were not even developed by Sun or were copied from other APIs; (3) Sun/Oracle has a long history of building their products on other people's APIs.

J2ME, SavaJe, etc..

[h8sg8s]

Sun and later Oracle were so fixated on the nonfunctional J2ME stack that they didn't see Google coming. Sun had the skeleton of what later became Android with the SavaJe acquisition but didn't have the funds or desire to make it happen. They (and later Oracle) failed to adequately invest in mobile and now Google has. Larry is simply pissed that someone other than himself is making money on something he neglected to capitalize on. To Lawsuit Larry, that's a crime - to anyone else, it's called business.