Its Another Victory For Google Over Oracle In Java Copyright Case

Back in May a court in the US ruled that Google didn’t violate any copyright laws in the use of Java APIs in Android. Oracle had sought the court to ask Google to pay them $9b for what they saw as a violation. Well like I said, the court ruled in Google’s favour by saying Google’s Android operating system does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by “fair use.” The verdict was reached after three days of deliberations.

Well oracle this time went to another court in California for just about the same thing. They argued this time that some evidence had been missed from the initial trial. The case was quickly thrown out by the judge after citing their new testimony as a minor evidence and testimony.

Here’s part of what District Judge William Alsup said about the new case; “It may well be true that the use of the copyrighted APIs in ARC++ (or any other later use) will not qualify as a fair use, but that will not and does not mean that Google’s argument on transformative use as to the original uses on trial (smartphones and tablets) was improper. That Oracle failed to detect the ARC++ documents in its possession had no consequence within the defined scope of our trial,” 

According to an Android Authority report on the ruling, this third trial was based on Google’s decision to bring Android apps to Chromebook. Called ARC++, it required the use of Java APIs used in Android but Oracle claimed Google was deliberately concealing evidence. But as the report noted, Google published at least nine documents discussing the goals and technical details of ARC++ in 2015, at least five months before the last trial. The judge then decided that Oracle didn’t read the documents and hence cannot accuse Google of deliberately concealing evidence. Including them in the new trail would not change the previous ruling.

When would this battle end? I don’t have an answer for this.