Round 2 in Oracle and Google's titanic copyright battle over Java APIs is now fully joined at the Supreme Court. Google asked the court in January to review two Federal Circuit decisions that it said threw “a devastating one-two punch at the software industry.” The company argues that copyright protection should not extend to “software interfaces,” and that lower courts “are badly in need of guidance on how to apply the fair-use doctrine in the context of computer code.”

Oracle fired back Wednesday, accusing Google of rehashing the same copyrightability arguments the court has already rejected, and of lining up “the usual list of amici” in an effort to muddle the state of fair use law.

“Nothing has changed” since the justices followed the solicitor general's recommendation to deny cert on copyrightability four years ago, Oracle states in a brief signed by Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe partner Josh Rosenkranz. “Nor has software development suffered the devastating impact Google predicted; the industry is doing better than ever.”

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Google argues that the Java APIs shouldn't be copyrightable because they merely provide a shorthand for accessing preexisting libraries of code. Google wrote its own implementing code, and copied only the Java declarations so that programmers could use the language to create Android applications. The Federal Circuit ruled in 2014 that the APIs—11,500 lines of code organized into 37 packages—are copyrightable. On retrial, a San Francisco jury found Google's copying a fair use, but the Federal Circuit then ruled the use was not fair as a matter of law.

Google has drawn amicus support at the Supreme Court from some 75 IP scholars and from nonprofit advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, Engine Advocacy and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Microsoft, which previously supported Oracle on copyrightability, is backing Google on fair use.

Oracle says in Wednesday's filing that there's no circuit split on fair use to resolve, and no reason to excuse Google's “egregious” copying of an entire software platform. “Neither Google nor its amici cites a single case—in any court—that has ever found it permissible to copy this much code (or this much structure and organization)” and use it for the same purpose, Rosenkranz writes.

The idea that the Federal Circuit upset the law of fair use is “vacuous, no matter how many amici Google could recruit to sign briefs attesting to their unwarranted contrary expectation,” Rosenkranz adds.

“Google's theory is that, having invested all those resources to create a program popular with platform developers and app programmers alike, Oracle should be required to let a competitor copy its code so that it can coopt the fan base to create its own best-selling sequel,” he concludes. “That argument would never fly with any other copyrighted work.”

Also signing onto Oracle's brief in opposition are Orrick partner Annette Hurst, Kirkland & Ellis partner Dale Cendali, and Oracle general counsel Dorian Daley, and associate GCs Deborah Miller and Matthew Sarboraria. Google's team includes counsel of record Kannon Shanmugam of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and attorneys from Goldstein & Russell; Keker, Van Nest & Peters; King & Spalding; and Kwun Bhansali Lazarus.