Larry Page, executive director of Google Inc., right, speaks to the media as he arrives at the court in San Jose, California, USA, on Monday, September 19, 2011.
Ryan Anson | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The Supreme Court joined Google on Monday against Oracle in a long-running copyright dispute over software used in Android, the mobile operating system.
The court’s decision was 6-2. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has not yet been 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, which were copied from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in 2010. was seen as a dispute over what types of computer code are protected under U.S. copyright law.
Oracle claimed that at some points it owed up to $ 9 billion, while Google claimed that the use of the code was covered by the doctrine of correct use.
Oracle sued Google for using its code and won the case twice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The Supreme Court overturned the decision of the appellate court.
Read more: Judges are wary of the tech industry at war in Google’s fight against Oracle Supreme Court
Judge Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion in this case, agreed that Google’s use of the code is protected under fair use.
“I concluded that in this case, where Google re-implemented a user interface, taking only what was necessary to allow users to put their accumulated talents into a new and transformative program, Google’s copy of The Sun Java API was a fair use of that material as a matter of law, “Breyer wrote.
Breyer was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Judges Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito disagreed.
The case, one of the most significant of the term, presented a high-profile battle over competing views on the future of software development.
“The long-established practice of reusing software interfaces is critical to the development of modern software,” veteran Supreme Court attorney Tom Goldstein told law attorney during the arguments.
The case was originally scheduled to be heard by the deadline, before it was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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