Monday, June 29, 2015

The US Supreme Court rejected the appeal in the case of Google Oracle against Android – Computer Information Portal

Many years of judicial confrontation between Oracle and Google on the use of Java in Android operating system comes to an end. Despite the attempt to Google using the Electronic Frontier Foundation to convince the Supreme Court to consider the appeal against the decision of the Federal Court, the question of the protection application programming interfaces (API) Copyright closed permanently.

The refusal of the Supreme Court to recognize the API free of copyright returns the case to the District Court of California, which now has to reach a verdict on the basis of clarification of the federal court. With a new precedent Oracle’s position against Google becomes actually winning, as the fact of repetition structures in Java Android SDK is confirmed, and a few years ago, Google has won only because Judge William Alsup ruled Haskell that API is not subject to copyright protection. With the abolition of his decision, Google was the only option to be able to save the situation and get away from the fine – to convince the court that copying Java API was carried out according to the criteria of “fair use”, that is, Google had no choice to ensure compatibility with Java, but to copy the structure of interfaces and calls. From the perspective of the Wikimedia Foundation, who has made the criteria known to a large number of people in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, fair use should bring more good than harm in the use of materials protected by copyright. Nevertheless, Android, although it is free software, is widely used for commercial purposes, and an attempt to protect the above criteria may fail. However, the district court in California is known for having not like to make decisions in favor of the copyright holders, so the position at Google and unstable, but not nearly as disastrous as if the case was heard in the District Court of Texas.

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From an economic point of view, Oracle is now a good chance to top up their finances and fine sign Google and its partners to cash payments. However, you must understand that Oracle is not interested in having to “destroy Android”, or declare “thermonuclear war”, announced in the recent past, the head of Google Eric Schmidt, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Oracle is in the position in which it is desirable to obtain Google’s contributions of this size, so as not to force the Internet giant to abandon in favor of other Java programming language, whether it’s an open C # from Microsoft, or your own design, such as Golang, or Dartlang. Android Java ecosystem is considered persona non grata, although it is the largest and most successful implementation of the language, and all the conferences, which are held on the development of the language system from Google never actually mentioned. If Oracle wins in litigation, then Google will be forced to bring in compliance with the specifications of Android Oracle, or to keep the current implementation, but more expensive to buy a commercial license. However, in both cases, the position of the Android ecosystem in Java would be more desirable.

With regard to the comments of experts, well-known blogger Florian Mueller, a lawyer engaged in the legal coverage of events in the IT-industry, believes that the court should not go on the occasion of tactics “fair use”, which will use Google. The opposite opinion was expressed by the founder of the studio Epic Games, which develops 3D-engine Unreal Engine, Tim Sweeney, who agreed with the decision of the Supreme Court not to consider the appeal of Google, but he suggested in his microblog on Twitter, from a technical point of view, up API for compatibility is quite It may be protected by the fair use criteria. Google and Oracle had no comment on the decision of the Supreme Court.

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