Editorial: Oracle loses big stakes gamble against Android

Following its recent patent infringement loss against Google in a Californian court action, Oracle has now followed that failure with loss of its copyright claims in the same suit as well.

Judge Alsup, arguably the most respected juror of his generation, has ruled that the Java APIs at issue are not copyrightable, effectively handing Oracle a legal black eye. The conclusion of this action, some two years after its commencement, raises the question as to the motives of Oracle in bringing it to court in the first place given that the trial proper became a switch in importance from the alleged infringement of dozens of patents, to a skirmish about copyright of API code in what is supposedly a "free to use" programming language.

Jury rejects Oracle’s suit against Google in patent spat

In what was unlikely to surprise those paying attention, and as predicted by AndroidNZ two weeks ago, Oracle’s attempt to extort six billion dollars from Google over Android’s supposed infringement of Java patents has been rejected by the jury in the long-running case.

As a result, there will be no penalty phase in the trial, and Oracle will have to resort to appeal to try to salvage something from a litigation that must surely have already cost the company many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, perhaps millions.

Jury finds Google infringed Java copyright

Google has been found to have infringed on Java’s API (application programming interface) copyright by a jury in Northern California, at the end of the first phase of a suit brought by Oracle against Google. As owner of Java, Oracle is seeking around a billion dollars US in damages against Google, owner of Android, in a three part action.

This result was expected since Google’s own witnesses have admitted that the existence of nine lines of code forming a range check must have been included verbatim from the original Java code, and therefore not possibly Google’s own work. However, Google claimed “fair use” in its defence and the jury was unable to agree on whether or not that common copyright element applies in this case.