In Java Trial, Judge Says Google Owes Oracle Exactly Nothing

After 18 months of pre-trial wrangling, millions of dollars in legal expenses, six weeks of jury arguments, testimony from chief execs Larry Ellison and Larry Page, and umpteen attempts to explain what the hell an API does, Oracle’s copyright and patent lawsuit over Google’s Android operating system has resulted in the database giant winning exactly zero dollars in damages. On Wednesday, Judge William Alsup officially ruled that although a jury found that in some cases Google had infringed on Oracle’s copyrights in building Android, the search giant isn’t required to pay any money for this infringement. This was expected. Oracle had originally sought extensive damages from Google, but in the middle of the trial, after the jury reached a partial decision on the claims at the heart of Oracle’s case, the database giant agreed to forgo such damages unless a ruling from the judge trumped the jury’s decision. That did not happen, and Oracle is at ground zero. But the company intends to appeal the case to a higher court. In August of 2010 — shortly after acquiring Sun Microsystems, the maker of Java — Oracle sued Google, claiming the search giant infringed on various Java-related copyrights and patents in building Android. At the core of its argument was the claim that Google had illegally cloned 37 APIs, or applications programming interfaces, used by the Java platform. Google did clone the APIs — the idea was to build a new version of the platform that runs applications written in the Java programming language — but the company always contended that the code used to clone these APIs was its own. The jury decided that Google had infringed on Oracle’s copyrights in cloning the APIs, but it could not decide whether this should be considered “fair use” under the law. The jury also decided that Google had infringed on Oracle’s copyrights in lifting a mere nine lines of code directly from the Java platform, and Judge Alsup ruled that Google had infringed in lifting a handful of other files. But these were relatively minor infractions. The jury then ruled that Google had not infringed on Oracle’s patents in building Android, leaving Oracle’s case hanging by a thread. The open question was whether an application programming interface — something that lets one piece of software talk to another — should be subject to copyright in the first place. At one point, Oracle agreed to forgo extensive damages if Judge Alsup ruled that the APIs were not subject to copyright, and that’s indeed how he ruled. Oracle declined to comment on the judge’s latest ruling. But it had indicated that it plans to appeal the case. “We’re happy to have this done and to move forward,” said Google.