Oracle Tells Supreme Court Google Copyright Breach Knocked It Out Of Smartphone Market (crn.com)

Joseph Tsidulko, writing for CRN: Oracle asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to not review an appellate court's decision finding Google violated Oracle's copyright of the Java platform when building the Android mobile operating system. In that opposition brief, Oracle's attorneys said Google's copyright violation shut Oracle, the Java platform owner, out of the emerging smartphone market, causing incalculable harm to its business. The complex case pitting two Silicon Valley giants against each other has raged on since 2010, and already saw many twists in turns before a circuit court last year reversed a jury decision in favor of Oracle. That prompted Google's appeal to the nation's highest court. Oracle notes Google had previously asked for a writ of certiorari -- the legal term for review by the high court -- in 2015 without success in an earlier phase of the case, and the company argues nothing has changed in the time since.

Oracle believes Google destroyed its hopes of competing as a smartphone platform developer with the Java platform, which enables development and execution of software written in Java, including through APIs that access a vast software library. The lawsuit alleged Google copied those APIs without a proper license. Java was developed at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. "Google's theory is that, having invested all those resources to create a program popular with platform developers and app programmers alike, Oracle should be required to let a competitor copy its code so that it can coopt the fan base to create its own best-selling sequel," Oracle's brief states.

Comments

Re:When evil battles evil

[Tablizer]

Who do I root for?

Oracle is trying to trick the courts into allowing the copyrighting of interfaces. Before it was mostly limited implementation. Thus, Oracle is potentially doing more damage to the legal system.

Re:America has forgotten.

[green1]

That's not how it works.

You hire lawyers and politicians to make it legally impossible for people to go with a competing product, then you launch your own inferior product and wait for the money to roll in.

THAT's how it works.

Competing on actual merit is so last century.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, "most popular language for mobile apps" is misleading. C was the most popular language for mobile code.

But C didn't have sandboxing capabilities, etc. Fault isolation and data protection in native code relies on a memory protection unit, which was too complex/expensive to be included in dumb phone processors.

So downloadable "apps" mostly used Java which had some inherent security features based in a mandatory type-safety system.

But "smartphones" have always had better hardware, and in particular they've had MPUs, so there was no reason to use (slow, bloated) Java except for portability. And in the early days of smartphones there were only 3 or 4 processor architectures in use, and any OS that had more than one had enough smarts built into the app deployment systems (for example, ActiveSync for WinCE) to pick the right binary for the phone.

So Java never had a foothold on honest-to-God smartphones before Google introduced Dalvik and Android -- only on feature phones. So you may be able to make the statement true by adding enough qualifiers -- "the most popular language for MMS-downloadable applets on feature phones" -- but that was a doomed niche.

Re: FALSE

[Dragonslicer]

Minor correction, can be copyrighted. Not every API that comes into existence automatically becomes copyrighted unless the author says so and even then if they only enforce it.

Your correction is incorrect, at least in the United States. Creative works are automatically protected by copyright from the time they are created; no additional action by the author is necessary. Unlike trademarks, copyright (as well as patent) protection is not lost for failure to actively defend it.

Re:When evil battles evil

[StormReaver]

Dammit! Why the hell doesn't Slashdot provide a preview feature before posting!?

Oh, wait.

This is how it should have looked:

How is this ANY different than the MS Java case?

Microsoft agreed to abide by Sun's licensing terms in exchange for being allowed to call J# an implementation of Java. Microsoft violated those terms by making J# incompatible with Java.

Google copied the interface specification, wrote its entirely own implementation, and made it quite clear that it was NOT Java; but rather had a high degree of compatibility with certain parts of Java.

These cases could hardly be any more different. They are nearly polar opposites.

Given that, Google was really stupid about the whole thing. It should have started with the GPL'd Java, stripped out the parts not wanted for Android, then GPL'd the whole thing. Tada! A clean and completely unassailable (through copyright) Android. Plus many millions of litigation dollars saved.