Earlier, we had seen that Oracle had claimed $9 billion from Google for using 37 application programming interfaces in its Android software that came from a programming language called Java which is owned by Oracle. This trial had been going on for years, where the views of many knowledgeable people were taken into consideration. In 2010 Oracle first filed the suit where they claimed copyright and patent infringement. In the suit we know that Oracle lost the patent infringement case, but won the copyright case.
As expected, Google soon made an appeal. An appeals court found that Google had copied parts of 37 APIs that allows software apps to communicate with each other and share data. Google did not copy the whole APIs, but using the same names and operations they wrote their own code to execute the functions. Oracle was trying to prove that the headings and sequence which are parts of the 37 APIs that Google used required a lot of creativity. To prove this they invoked Harry potter. Oracle’s lawyers compared what Google did to the Harry Potter books, saying it was as if Google took the chapter titles.
Before taking any decision the judge, William Alsup , studied the Java programming language to get a better understanding of the case. In an earlier phase of the case, he was in favor of Google’s argument that APIs should not be copyrightable. In an earlier phase of the case, he found in favor of Google’s argument that APIs should not be copyrightable. But an appeals court overturned Alsup’s decision and with the Supreme Court refusing to take on the case both sides came back to court to hear Google’s next defense. This battle has been on for quite some time, but last week the verdict was in favor of Google. This decision has given comfort to many Programmers, who were tensed because they too write applications that run across different platforms without a license.
