The new solicitor general doesn't like Google's Supreme Court case against Oracle any more than the old solicitor general did.

SG Noel Francisco's office formally recommended to the Supreme Court on Friday that it deny certiorari in the nine-year-old copyright battle between Silicon Valley titans. The office rejected Google LLC's arguments that the declaring code that organizes Java application programming interfaces can not be copyrighted. It also turned away Google's argument that using the code to make its Android operating system interoperable with Java was a fair use.

"The fair-use doctrine does not permit copying valuable parts of a work to attract fans to a competing commercial product," the office stated in in its brief.

Google is asking the Supreme Court for a second time to review the case, after prevailing twice in San Francisco federal court then suffering reversals each time by the Federal Circuit. Absent Supreme Court intervention, the case will go back for a third trial, this time on damages, with Oracle America Inc. seeking many billions of dollars. Oracle also has accused other Google products beyond smartphones of infringing.

Each time the Supreme Court has asked the SG's office for its views on the case. The office under Donald Verrilli recommended that the court deny cert in 2015, saying the Federal Circuit was correct that the APIs are copyrightable and that Google still had the opportunity to present its fair use defense. The court denied cert.

Jurors then found Google's use was fair in 2016, but the Federal Circuit again reversed, saying no reasonable jury could have found fair use.

On Friday, the solicitor general reaffirmed its stance on copyrightability. "Both declaring code and implementing code ultimately perform the same practical function: They instruct a computer to work," the brief states.

As for fair use, there were a few caveats. "Although a jury verdict should not be lightly set aside, the court's decision was correct," the brief states. In the end, "the court of appeals simply endorsed the unremarkable proposition that wholesale copying of thousands of lines of copyrighted code into a competing commercial product for the purpose of attracting developers familiar with the copyright owner's work, while causing actual commercial harm to the copyright owner, is not fair use."

Also signing onto the brief were Deputy AG Joseph Hunt, Deputy SG Malcolm Stewart, and DOJ attorneys Mark Freeman, Daniel Tenny and Sonia Carson. Stewart, Freeman and Carson were also signatories to the SG's 2015 brief.