In a case with major implications, the justices wrestled with a high-tech dispute over computer code using low-tech analogies.
The Supreme Court considered on Wednesday whether Google should have to pay Oracle billions of dollars in a long-running lawsuit over software used on many of the world’s smartphones, wrestling during a lively argument with the potentially enormous implications of what has been called the copyright case of the decade. Several justices noted how consequential a decision in the case could be. “I’m concerned,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a lawyer for Google, “that, under your argument, all computer code is at risk of losing protection.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted the opposite concern. “We’re told that if we agree with Oracle, we will ruin our tech industry in the United States,” he said. The justices heard the argument by telephone, and they used a series of low-tech analogies to test the two sides’ arguments. Their questions included ones on safecracking, football playbooks, typewriter keyboards, restaurant menus and telephone switchboards. The case, Google v. Oracle America, No.18-956, concerns Google’s reliance on aspects of Java, a programming language, in its Android operating system. Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, said that using parts of it without permission amounted to copyright infringement. Oracle has asked for billions of dollars in damages over what it said was Google’s wrongful copying of about 11,000 lines of software code. In 2016, a San Francisco jury found that Google had not violated copyright laws because it had made “fair use” of the code.
