Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-2 decision that Google’s use of Java in Android represents fair use and does not infringe on Oracle patents and copyrights.
In a case that went back and forth for more than a decade, the US Supreme Court has sided with Google in the dispute with Oracle over Google’s use of Java code in Android. The top court decided by a 6-2 vote that Google’s copying of a small fraction of the Java API did not infringe on Oracle copyrights but represented fair use. Nevertheless, Oracle still maintains that Google acted improperly. Google’s copying of the Java SE (Standard Edition) API, which included lines of code to allow programmers to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material, the court decreed in the ruling issued April 5, 2020. “The fact that computer programs are primarily functional makes it difficult to apply traditional copyright concepts in that technological world,” the court said.
