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:Wow

[bill_mcgonigle]

J2ME's UI options and system services were terrible for mobile.

Android, for all its warts, was substantially better. Java just happened to be a decent language for the time that could be hooked into the Android stack.

If it had been Swift or Python or Ruby it still would have pantsed any J2ME phone offering. Java isn't all that special. Look at iPhone - lots of people learned Objective-C just to use its mobile stack and in that case Apple itself showed how non-optimal a language that is by developing Swift.

Oracle is attempting to mislead the Court.

Re:Wow

[DarkOx]

Did I say it was? Oracle is not entitled to the mobile market. Like you I disagree with the premise that interfaces can be subject to copyright. If the court however finds otherwise; than damages will have to be figured. If we are forced to presume by the courts finding that interfaces can be copyright; than all I am saying is Oracles argument that Google cost them the mobile space probably does follow, and Google will in that instance be required to pay dearly.

Oracle purchased a poorly managed technology, JAVA

[Locutus]

When Google came on board with Dalvick, Sun was having a grand time putting JAVA in the browser and on the server. Those wanting to put it into embedded devices, it's original intent, were ignored by Sun Microsystems. As HP about that since they wanted to license JAVA for use in their printers but Sun would not address their requests for licensing. HP had to do a clean-room implementation which they called Chai or something like that( as in the tea ). No doubt there were many others since we all know HP is no small printer manufacturer and landing them would have been a large deal.

But somehow we are to expect, or the judges are, that it was all Google's fault? Java on mobile phones, back when phones were not very smart, was a mess with many different layers of API's to follow. I forget what they called that mobile version of JAVA but each phone vendor had different application stores and different application requirements.

Apple showed that the market for downloading applications on mobile devices was viable again( remember Palm did it years before ) and Google just followed their lead. Had the phone vendors considered their Sun JAVA mobile API's sufficient they could have competed but they were stuck with what Sun provided and it was not really so good for the rich smartphone OS which was becoming the norm.

Oracle purchased Sun thinking they'd leverage JAVA everywhere but Sun left the mobile market and focused on the server side and browser...

LoB

Re: When evil battles evil

[green1]

Unfortunately the legal precedent wouldn't be just for Java. It would be for all APIs for every piece of software ever written.

You may not like Java, and that's perfectly fair, but that's not a reason to root for Oracle in this case.

What stopped Oracle forking Android?

[presidenteloco]

and taking "back" control of the mobile platform.
Maybe it would have had to rebrand it. e.g. Orafix, Mava (mobile java),..., what have you.

Nothing stopped Oracle from pulling a CyanogenMod move, but backed by Oracle's money.

Nothing except lack of willpower, imagination, and skill.

Re:What stopped oracle from "competing"?

[TheRaven64]

Not Oracle, but Sun has a lot of history in closely related spaces. The original Java platform (back when Java was called Green) was the 7*, a handheld computer that ran a modified Solaris that supported execute in place and ran happily with a 32-bit SPARC and 1MB of RAM. The vast majority of pre-iPhone smartphones and featurephones included J2ME, which (unlike J2SE) required a license fee from each phone maker.

This is the main reason that Sun was unhappy with Android. They'd been receiving royalties from pretty much every phone to be able to use Java and then suddenly Google came along with a Java implementation that didn't require anyone to pay Sun. Worse, as with Microsoft's J++, it wasn't a fully conformant implementation of Java - it did both subsetting and supersetting, so arbitrary Java code doesn't work on Android and arbitrary Android Java code doesn't work on other JVMs.