Google vs. Oracle: The Tech-Titans Battle in US Supreme Court

Overview of the Case

Google developed the Android operating system when it entered the smartphone market. The tech giant wanted the operating system to understand commands commonly used in the Java SE platform. To do that it used 11,000 lines of code from Java SE within Android. The question for the justices was whether this reuse of those lines by Google’s code violates the copyright laws.

First District Court Trial: Oracle initiated a suit against Google in District Court for the Northern District of California and argued that the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were copyrightable and sought US$8.8 billion in damages.

Judge Alsup issued the final verdict on May 31, 2012. Even though the jury had found for Oracle regarding copyright infringement of the APIs, Alsup determined that the APIs were not copyrightable in the first place:

"So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical."

However, Jury’s ruling that the range check function and eight security files were a copyright infringement was accepted by Judge Alsup. This was found for statutory damages up to a maximum of US$150,000.

First Circuit Court Appeal: This decision was appealed in the United States Court of Appeals in the Federal Circuit. The court ruled in favour of Oracle and stated that APIs were copyrightable. In the judgement released on May 9, 2014, the court stated, "that the overall structure of Oracle's API packages is creative, original, and resembles a taxonomy."

The case was remanded to the District Court for a second trial, to consider whether Google's use was acceptable anyway, under the doctrine of fair use, since the original case had not brought out the facts related to fair use sufficiently for the Appeal Court to rule on that point.

Supreme Court Petition: In October 2014, Google petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. Oracle responded to the petition in December. Following a discussion of the petition at the Court's January 9 conference, the Court issued a Call for the Views of the Solicitor General, asking for the U.S. Solicitor General's input on whether the petition should be granted.

Second District Court Trial: As ordered by the Appeals Court, a new district court trial began on May 9, 2016. The question before the court was whether Google's actions were fair use. On May 26, 2016, the jury found that Android does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs was protected by fair use.

Second Circuit Court Appeal: Oracle's appeal was heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2017. The Court ruled in favour of Oracle on March 27, 2018. Thus, the court ruled that the software interface is entitled to copyright protection. This prompted Google to take the case to the highest US court.

Writ in the Supreme Court of United States: Google filed a petition for writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court of the United States in January 2019 to challenge the two rulings that were made by the Appeals Court towards Oracle's favour.

In its petition, Google centred their case on whether copyright extends to a software interface like an API, and whether the use of the Java API by Google fell within the fair use as found at the jury trials.

In orders issued in April 2019, the Court asked the Solicitor General of the United States to file an amicus brief to outline the government's stance on the case. The Trump administration supported Oracle and urged the Court to deny the writ of certiorari. Google "copied 11,500 lines of (Oracle's) copyrighted code" as well as the "complex architecture of the 37 packages at issue," a Justice Department brief said. The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, said in a court filing that allowing Google to walk away with "intellectual property theft" would make it hard to protect any digital property from Chinese misappropriation. The American Association of Publishers  sided with Oracle and said that weakening copyright protection would make it more difficult "to create and disseminate original works of authorship."

Businesses like Microsoft, Mozilla Corporation and Red Hat Inc. filed amicus briefs in support of Google's position. Among additional briefs filed by third-parties in support of Google's stance include IBM, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Internet Association, the Auto Care Association, the Developers Alliance, and a collective group of over 150 academics and computer professionals. The briefs cautioned that a decision in favour of Oracle would hurt the computing world as a whole. These petitions argued that extending copyright protection to APIs would threaten innovation in the fast-evolving digital world.

The Arguments in the Supreme Court: The oral arguments consisted of judges applying analogies after analogies to understand computer programs. From grocery stores to restaurant menus to QWERTY keyboards, none was left out.

Justice Roberts suggested that the fact that Oracle's code has become so important that others seek to copy it implies that the company should be rewarded, not hurt through copyright infringement.

"The fact that programmers really liked it and that's what everyone used, it seems a bit much to penalize them for that," he said.

Google argued that this form of unlicensed copying is completely standard in software. It actually saves developers time so that they can create new products, and lowers barriers to innovation.

While Oracle's attorney argued Google's copying undermined Sun's investments in developing the original code, and that a decision by the Court in Google's favour would ruin the software industry by making it so that developers could not be rewarded for their work.

Google countered this by stating that finding in Oracle's favour would destroy the software industry by erecting enormous copyright hurdles for all developers and forcing them either to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to instruct a computer to do something, or to pay licensing fees to the most dominant software companies for the right to carry out simple, mundane tasks.

But Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that, in the time since the appellate court, the Federal Circuit, ruled for Oracle in 2014, Google's nightmare scenario has not come to pass.

"I'm not aware that the sky has fallen in the last five or six years with that ruling on the books," Kavanaugh said.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan appeared more sympathetic to Google. Justice Kagan cited several methods of organizing and presenting information that she argued were similar but not copyrightable — including the periodic table of the elements and systems to classify animal species.

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito focused on the procedural issue on whether it was appropriate for the Federal Circuit to overrule a prior jury decision in favour of Google.

In this significant case, a clear ruling for Google could end the marathon legal battle, while a decision for Oracle could send the case back to lower courts -- and a potential retrial. Whatever the ruling may be, it would surely have far-reaching consequences.