Larry Page, CEO of Google Inc., on the right, speaks to the media when he arrives at the court in San Jose, California, USA, on Monday, September 19, 2011.
Ryan Anson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Monday supported Google against Oracle in a long-running copyright dispute over software used on Android, the mobile operating system.
The court’s decision was 6-2. Minister Amy Coney Barrett, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate when the case was discussed in October, did not participate in the case.
The case concerned 12,000 lines of code that Google used to build Android that were copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. It was seen as a historic dispute over the types of code of computer under protection American copyright law.
Oracle at some points claimed that it was owed up to $ 9 billion, while Google claimed that its use of the code was covered by the fair use doctrine and therefore was not subject to copyright liability.
Oracle sued Google for the use of its code and won the case twice before the United States Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which found Google’s use of the code to be unfair.
The Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s decision.
Read More: Judges fear overthrowing the tech industry in the Google-Oracle feud in the Supreme Court
Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in the case, agreed that Google’s use of the code was protected by fair use, noting that Google took “just what was necessary to allow users to put their accumulated talents to work in a new and transformative program. “
“To the extent that Google used parts of the Sun Java API to create a new platform that could be readily used by programmers, its use was consistent with the creative ‘progress’ that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself,” added Breyer.
Breyer was accompanied by Chief Justice John Roberts and Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito disagreed.
The case, one of the most significant of the term, presented a high-profile battle over competing views of the future of software development.
“The long-established practice of reusing software interfaces is critical to the development of modern software,” Google attorney, veteran Supreme Court attorney Tom Goldstein told judges during the discussions.
The case was originally scheduled to be heard in the last semester, before being postponed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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