US court finds ‘Google infringed Oracle’s Android copyright’

A US court on Friday ruled on appeal that Google has infringed Oracle’s copyright with its Android operating system. In doing so, the councilor reverses the decision of a judge two years ago.

Although Google used partly the same naming for methods and classes in Android as in Java, Google subsequently wrote the implementations of those methods itself. The Android maker adopted the method names from 37 of Java’s total of 166 api packages to keep Android as compatible as possible with existing Java code.

The acquired parts made up just three percent of all lines of code in the 37 API packages in 2012, with the rest written by Google itself. Still, the court ruled on Friday that Google had made a mistake because “the code presented and the structure, order and organization of the API packages infringe copyright.”

The court returned the ruling to the judge on Friday, who must reconsider the case. It must find out whether Google has used fair use, which means that copyrighted material may be used under certain conditions. According to the Court of Appeal, it is not clear to determine when something is fair use.

The conflict between Oracle and Google over the 37 API packages has been going on for years. The first case was in 2012, when the American judge ruled in favor not Oracle, but Google. At the time, the judge rejected that Oracle’s copyright rests on the structure of the Java programming language. Oracle had to pay Google $1.1 million in litigation costs. The company then said it would appeal.

Oracle said Friday that the court’s ruling is “a victory for the entire software industry that relies on copyright to promote innovation,” Ars Technica wrote. Google and other opposition parties, on the other hand, believe that the functionality of the code should be looked at, and not the creativity. Moreover, according to the counterparties, an api serves to connect software with each other and the copyright should not stand in the way of this.