Alsup's ruling comes less than a month after a European court made a decision along the same lines, finding that programming APIs can't be copyrighted because it would "monopolize ideas."
What now?Overall, Oracle spent many millions—perhaps tens of millions—on its legal crusade against Google and came up empty. The company scanned 15 million lines of Android code and found one simple nine-line function that had been copied from Java; that code is no longer in Android, and Oracle will be limited to statutory damages for that copying, which can't be more than $150,000 (and could be much less).
Oracle has promised to appeal the decision, saying it will continue to support "the broader Java community" of over 9 million developers. "The court's reliance on "interoperability" ignores the undisputed fact that Google deliberately eliminated interoperability between Android and all other Java platforms," the company said in a statement issued this afternoon. "Google's implementation intentionally fragmented Java and broke the "write once, run anywhere" promise."
To get any copyright royalties from Google, Oracle will not only have to get Alsup's API decision overturned on appeal, it would have to win a whole new jury trial as well. That will take years and looks exceedingly unlikely at this point.
For the Java programmers of the world, things won't really change much. If Oracle had won, it would have been a novel case of a company being able to essentially reverse the open-source process by making any commercial use of Java a pay-to-play endeavor. Some speculated an Oracle win could have scared programmers away from Java, but that kind of ruminating is a moot point now.
It didn't take more than 15 minutes from the time Alsup's ruling showed up on the federal court's e-filing system for a Google spokesperson to send out a statement on the company's win: "The court’s decision upholds the principle that open and interoperable computer languages form an essential basis for software development. It’s a good day for collaboration and innovation."
A case management conference is scheduled for June 21 in Alsup's court. That conference will deal with the small amount of statutory damages Oracle is owed.
Even on the one admittedly copied function, Alsup clearly thinks Oracle is way out of line. He devoted a whole section in today's order to the copied function, called rangeCheck(), calling the copying did take place "innocuous and overblown by Oracle." Joshua Bloch, the Google engineer who wrote rangeCheck(), wrote it in his own spare time, as part of a larger block of code which he donated to an open implementation of Java. "This was an innocent and inconsequential instance of copying in the context of a massive number of lines of code," Alsup concluded.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4