Supreme Court will not hear Google’s appeal in dispute with Oracle

The United States Supreme Court, the US Supreme Court, does not want to hear Google’s appeal in the copyright case with Oracle. A year ago, a US judge ruled that Google infringed Oracle’s copyright with Android.

Bloomberg reported this on Monday. The decision upholds the judge’s ruling of Friday, May 9, 2014, allowing Oracle to charge a fee for the use of some parts of the Java programming language in Android. Google, in turn, thought it didn’t have to do that, something for which the company was found in favor in 2012, after which Oracle appealed again and the latter won in 2014.

The case is about how much copyright protection should be provided with regard to Java. Android has some of the same naming conventions as Java for methods and classes, but has written the implementations itself. In Android, the method names of 37 of the 166 api packages from Java have been adopted, in order to keep the operating system as compatible as possible with the existing Java code.

Google stated that if Oracle won, a “huge amount of innovation” would be lost, because developers would then no longer be able to freely build on each other’s work. On the other hand, Oracle found that copyright protection is important in software innovation.

Oracle sued Google in 2010, demanding approximately $1 billion for copyright violations. The Obama administration had previously been asked to shed light on the case and asked the Supreme Court not to hear the case. The trial is once again moved to a federal court in San Francisco.