The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to jump into the huge copyright battle between Google and Oracle, steering clear of what many legal experts considered a chance to further define the legal boundaries of software protection.
Google last year asked the Supreme Court to wade into its billion-dollar legal feud with Oracle, which has been unfolding in San Francisco federal court since 2010. Oracle claimed Google’s Android operating system had violated copyright protections by improperly incorporating parts of its Java technology.
The Supreme Court outcome is a win for Oracle, although the two sides are expected to continue to battle in federal court on separate issues still remaining.
“We will continue to defend the interoperability that has fostered innovation and competition in the software industry,” Google said in a statement Monday.
A federal judge initially found after a trial that the Java components in dispute could not be covered by copyright law, but an appeals court disagreed. The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals last year concluded that the technology could be protected; the Java components belong to a category of software tools known as application programming interfaces, or APIs, considered building blocks for creating software that interacts with other programs.
Google, in urging the Supreme Court to review the issues, warned that the appeals court ruling would undermine “the basic building blocks of computer design and programming.”
The legal battle could have provided the Supreme Court with an opportunity to settle divisions in the tech industry over when federal copyright protections should apply to basic software innovations that are used in some instances without the permission of the original developer, in this instance Oracle and its popular Java program. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo have sided with Google, while Microsoft has stood by Oracle since the case began.
But the Supreme Court followed the advice of the Obama administration in refusing to accept the case. Earlier this year, the high court asked the U.S. solicitor general to submit a brief in the case, a common practice when the justices seek the federal government’s legal views in cases with national implications. After a lengthy internal debate, the administration filed arguments against review.
Howard Mintz covers legal affairs. Contact him at 408-286-0236 or follow him at Twitter.com/hmintz.
