This article originally appeared in sibling publication The Recorder.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup handed Google Inc. a major victory on Thursday when he dismissed claims that the Android mobile phone platform infringes Oracle Corp.’s copyrights relating to the Java computer language.
Oracle had accused Google of infringing the “structure, sequence and organization” of 37 of Java’s API packages, or application programming interfaces. In a 41-page decision, Alsup ruled that the particular Java elements that Google replicated were free for all to use under copyright law. “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,” Alsup wrote.
The judge was careful to note that he was not ruling that Java API packages are free for all to use without a license, or that the structure, sequence, and organization of all computer programs may be stolen. But in the case at hand, 97 percent of the lines of software code in Android were new to Google, and Alsup found that the remaining 3 percent were functional and operational and therefore ineligible for copyright protection.
Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Google’s lead lawyer in the case, Robert Van Nest of Keker & Van Nest, said he was thrilled with the order. “It is a thorough treatment of the facts and a searching treatment of the law, and it’s consistent with the evidence which was presented at the trial and the briefing that was filed alongside the evidence,” Van Nest said.
A Google spokesman emailed the following statement, “The court’s decision upholds the principle that open and interoperable computer languages form an essential basis for software development. It’s a good day for collaboration and innovation.”
The ruling is yet another setback for Oracle, which once valued damages in the case at $6 billion. Oracle filed suit against Google in San Francisco federal court in August 2011, claiming that the Android mobile operating system infringed Java copyrights and patents (which Oracle got the rights to when it acquired Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2010). In the first phase of the trial, the jury returned a verdict that said that Google infringed the structure, sequence, and organization of 37 API packages. But even at the time, Oracle’s copyright win was mixed at best, since the jury deadlocked on Google’s affirmative defense that it only made fair use of Java technologyand Alsup had made it clear he still had to decide whether the APIs could be copyrighted.
Michael Jacobs of Morrison & Foerster referred a request for comment on Thursday’s decision to Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger. In an emailed statement, Hellinger said Oracle intended to appeal. “This ruling, if permitted to stand, would undermine the protection for innovation and invention in the United States and make it far more difficult to defend intellectual property rights against companies anywhere in the world that simply takes them as their own.”
Brown Rudnick IP litigator Edward Naughton, who has been following the case and does not represent either of the parties involved, called Alsup’s decision careful and measured. “It’s something that I think students are going to be reading in copyright classes for a long time to come,” Naughton said. “The judge was careful to base this on the facts of the case in front of him and to try to avoid making sweeping decisions.”
That said, Naughton added that Oracle still has plenty of grounds for appeal since the decision is based largely on legal conclusions. Pointing to a particular section of Alsup’s decision that contained an analysis of Baker v. Seldon, a U.S. Supreme Court case from the 1870s, Naughton said, “There’s really no cases that address [the copyrightability of APIs] squarely.”
