Sonia Sotomayor Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Photo: Diego Radzinschi/ALM)

Google LLC and Oracle America Inc. squared off Wednesday in their long-awaited Supreme Court showdown over software copyrights.

Goldstein & Russell's Thomas Goldstein argued for Google that the declaring code that creates a taxonomy of the Java programming language is uncopyrightable, because it's a method of operation and there's only one way to write the code that will work. Even if it is copyrightable, Google's use was fair, Goldstein argued.