Newsweek - USA (2019-06-07)

32 NEWSWEEK.COM JUNE 07, 2019

oogle calls it the “copyright case of the decade.”infringem“It” is the $9 billion copyright ent suit Oracle filed TECHNOLOGY

years ago. Oracle brought the case in 2010 after Goo-gle incorporated 11,500 lines of Oracle’s Java code into Google’s Android platform for smartphones and tablets. Android has since become the world’s most popular operating system, running on more than 2.5 billion devices.But each time, a federal appeals court overturned Google won twice at the U.S. District Court level. against the search giant nearly 10

ging the Supremporting Google’s plea.interfaces, or APIs? That mare the 175 companies, nonprofits and individuals who have signed 15 friend-of-the-court briefs sup-the verdict, ruling for Oracle. Now, Google is beg-do copyright laws give to application program but these interfaces are omnipresent in software Here’s the pressing issue: How much protection e Court to hear the case, and so ight sound arcane,

today. They form the junctions between all the dif-ferent software applications developed by various companies and independent developers that must seamlessly interact to work right.Pandora or Uber—All the apps that sit on our smartphones—use interfaces to communicate like

claim, through copyright, to own those interfaces, it tends. Not only can it determine who gets to write even be able to prevent rival platforms from ever nologycan limit innovation and competition, Google con-software on its own platform, but, as we’ll see, it may with our phones’ operating systems (Apple iOS for being written. iPhones, for example). If the owner of a platform can considers the case so consequential that it de-The Harvard Journal of Law and Tech-

to entrenching dominant firms in software industries,” trust Institute, which supports Google in the dispute.dried. Its basic argument: Google negotiated to take a and then it used portions of the code anyway. (And voted an entire 360-page “special issue” to it last year.says Randy Stutz, an attorney with the American Anti-license for the Java code, it wasn’t able to reach terms, “If the appeals court’s rulings stand, it’s likely to lead Oracle, on the other hand, says the case is cut-and-

that’s all true.) Now, it’s time to pay the piper.BlackBerry, Nokia and Danger.”cial license...including smartphone manufacturers own Java software could have becomsmartphone platform. (Although Java was written brief to the Supreme Court, “every company that wanted to use the Java platform“Before Android,” Oracle’s lawyers write in their Oracle claims that, if not for Android, Oracle’s took a come a mmajor er-

by Sun Microsystems, Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, (^)