Google Wins—Java APIs Are a Fair Use, High Court Rules
The Supreme Court justices rule 6-2 that Google used only the amount of Oracle code necessary to transform Java into "a highly creative and innovative tool for a smartphone environment."
April 05, 2021 at 10:46 AM
5 minute read
(Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM) After 11 years of knock-down, drag-out litigation Google has prevailed over Oracle Corp. in their copyright clash over Java application programming interfaces.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled flatly by a 6-2 vote Monday that Google's use of 11,500 lines of declaring code from the Java programming language was fair, because it used only the amount of code necessary to transform the work into "a highly creative and innovative tool for a smartphone environment"—namely, the Android operating system.
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