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Supreme Court rules in Google's favor in copyright dispute with Oracle
Supreme Court rules in Google's favor in copyright dispute with Oracle over Android software:
The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Google against Oracle in a long-running copyright dispute over the software used in Android, the mobile operating system.
The court's decision was 6-2. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not yet confirmed by the Senate when the case was argued in October, did not participate in the case.
The case concerned about 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 landmark dispute over what types of computer code are protected under American copyright law.
Oracle had claimed at points to be owed as much as $9 billion, while Google claimed that its use of the code was covered under the doctrine of fair use and therefore not subject to copyright liability. Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world.
See also:
Supreme Court hands Google a victory in a multibillion-dollar case against Oracle
In addition to resolving a multibillion-dollar dispute between the tech titans, the ruling helps affirm a longstanding practice in software development. But the Court declined to weigh in on the broader question of whether APIs are copyrightable.
Justices wary of upending tech industry in Google v. Oracle Supreme Court fight
Several of the other justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, suggested they were sympathetic to Oracle's copyright claims.
Still, they appeared reluctant to rule in Oracle's favor because of arguments made by leading computer scientists and Microsoft, in friend-of-the-court briefs, that doing so could upend the industry.
GOOGLE LLC v. ORACLE AMERICA, INC.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Held: Google's copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law. Pp. 11–36.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday April 06 2021, @02:09PM
What Sun was objecting to, and won $1.2 BILLION was that Microsoft had clearly violated the black and white text of the agreement they signed to license Java.
The agreement expressly stated that certain namespaces could not be extended in any way, creating an incompatible or "enhanced" or "extended" version. The very presence of a compatible but "extended" version violates the principle of Write Once Run Anywhere. That is why the license agreement expressly forbade that.
Wandering quasi off topic:
The zealousness with which Sun pursued this is why Java really is write once, run anywhere. At least it is, more so, than almost anything I can think of that came before it. Some ahead-of-time (AOT) languages (eg, C and others) might achieve this at the source code level. The UCSD p-System (Pascal) (early 1980s) achieved this at the binary level, like Java. Compile a p-System program (any source language, but usually Pascal) into p-Code, and it ran on any p-System from an Apple II to a Dec Vax, IBM, etc. With Java, I can (and did) take a program (mandelbrot) I wrote in 2004, and ran it on a Raspberry Pi which: (A) did not exist at the time, (B) it's ARM instruction set did not even exist in any sense I was aware of, and certainly no Java implementation existed for ARM, and (C) it's operating system (Linux) is different than what I tested my program on (Windows, Macintosh) during development. With Raspberry PI, it is evident that even Linux provides a certain level of write-once-run-anywhere, in that as long as your Linux program is built in tools available as standard packages in Linux, you can typically recompile your program on a new architecture, such as ARM (Raspberry PI) -- or soon RISC V.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.