Google (GOOG) won a key court victory yesterday in Northern California when Federal Judge William Alsup ruled that 37 of Oracle’s Java APIs are not protected by copyright law. APIs are the application program interfaces that help different pieces of code work together, and the court found that the APIs which Google “replicated” in its Android operating system are not copyrighted material. Judge Alsup wrote that under current copyright law “copyright protection never extends to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation or concept.”
Last May, federal jury said Wednesday that Google did not infringe Oracle patents that protect Oracle’s Java technology. The decision came after the jury found earlier in May that Google had infringed Oracle’s copyrights of Java APIs when it created its Android operating system.
The battle of the Larrys (Google CEO Larry Page vs. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison) began in 2010 shortly after Oracle (ORCL) acquired the Java programming language when it bought Sun Microsystems. Oracle subsequently sued Google, saying that Android infringed on Java copyrights and patents.
“It’s a good day for collaboration and innovation,” Google said in a press release yesterday. Oracle responded by saying that, “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…” Oracle says it will appeal yesterday’s ruling. In the meantime, software developers who copy existing APIs to build new platforms have some breathing room.
Judge Alsup stated clearly that this ruling does not mean all Java APIs can be used without a license, and that the court’s decision covers only the 37 APIs that were the subject of the lawsuit.
This case was the first of the so-called “smartphone war” cases to be heard by a jury. The jury actually sided with Oracle, saying that Google had infringed on Oracle’s copyrights. But Judge Alsup subsequently ruled that the structure, sequence and organization of the Java APIs used by Google was not copyrightable, so the jury’s decision became irrelevant.
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