Oracle loses $9-billion Java copyright lawsuit against Google

Google won a jury verdict that kills Oracle Corp's claim to a $9 billion slice of the search giant's Android phone business and may give comfort to programmers who write applications that run across different platforms without a licence.

Oracle contended that Google needed a licence to use its Java programming language to develop Android, the operating system in 80% of the world's mobile devices. Jurors in San Francisco federal court on Thursday rejected that argument and concluded Google made fair use of the code under copyright law.

Oracle started the second trial in a case spanning almost six years at an advantage, with the judge explaining that it had already been established that Google had infringed Oracle's copyrights. Oracle plans to appeal the verdict, while legal experts say overturning it will be difficult.

The verdict should provide reassurance to software companies that their method of creating common, interoperable software doesn't put them in legal jeopardy. Instead, it will promote the practice of writing re-implementations of the systems used to pass information between widely-used software.

The tens of thousands of software developers who use application programming interfaces -- the shortcuts that allow developers to write programmes to work across software platforms that were at the heart of the lawsuit -- will celebrate this outcome, according to Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC. Google's victory frees them of a key concern as they build everything from games to enterprise applications, he said.

"A lot of people have sort of breathed a sigh of relief," he said.

A federal appeals court's 2014 ruling that the Java APIs are eligible for copyright protection may still have a "chilling effect" on software companies, because few have the resources to mount a defence as vigorous as Google did, said Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law who has

followed the case closely since it was filed in 2010.

Still, the "ruling should encourage some of those companies that what they are doing is fair, and that they will ultimately prevail if sued for copyright infringement," he said.

Google relied on witnesses including former chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, who is now chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc, to convince jurors that it used Java to innovate, rather than merely copy code. Before joining Google, Schmidt worked at Sun Microsystems developing and marketing Java. Oracle acquired Sun in 2010 and Schmidt was involved in Google's failed

licensing negotiations that spurred the copyright-infringement lawsuit filed that year by the database maker.

Schmidt told jurors that, based on his "many years of experience" with Java, he believed Google was permitted to use the APIs without a negotiated licence, as long as the company relied on its own code. Sun promoted them as "free and open," and not sold or licensed separately from Java, he said.

Central to Oracle's bid for what would have been one of the largest jury verdicts in US history was its claim that Google has reaped $21 billion in profit from more than 3 billion activations of Android. Oracle sought damages of $8.8 billion, plus $475 million in what it claims was lost licensing revenue.

Oracle said it plans to seek review of the verdict by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, the same court that ruled in its favor in 2014.

"We strongly believe that Google developed Android by illegally copying core Java technology to rush into the mobile device market," Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley said. "Oracle brought this lawsuit to put a stop to Google's illegal behaviour. We believe there are numerous grounds for appeal." -- Bloomberg