Anyone hoping for more clarity in the smartphone battle playing out between Oracle Corp. and Google Inc. was out of luck on Wednesday afternoon.
After 90 minutes of arguments over dueling motions for judgment as a matter of law, U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco refused to rule out Google’s defense that its use of Java constituted fair use under copyright law. But Alsup declined to rule on a handful of thornier issues, such as whether the structure, sequence, and organization of Oracle’s 37 so-called API packages, or application programming interfaces, are copyrightable. If Alsup finds for Google on that question, he could essentially undo the mixed copyright verdict handed down in the case on Monday where a San Francisco jury found for Oracle on the major issue of copyright infringement, but deadlocked on whether Google made fair use of Oracle’s Java technology in its Android operating system for smartphones.
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