Google returns to court to protect future programming

^{Oracle Executive Director Larry Ellison}

A year and a half ago, Google won a convincing victory over Oracle in a lawsuit over the use of Java code in the Android operating system. However, on Wednesday, December 4, Google representatives were summoned to the US Court of Appeals to testify about the Oracle appeal. This means that the process can be resumed, and the previous decision can be canceled.

If someone forgot, in August 2010, after acquiring Sun Microsystems (Java developer), Oracle sued Google, accusing it of violating various Java rights and patents while developing the Android operating system. The main accusation was the illegal cloning of 37 APIs to create their own version of the Java platform. After a lengthy review of the case , the programmer judge ruled that Google did not violate the Oracle copyright of the API due to the absence of these rights. After studying the Java programming language and writing several programs, the judge decided that these APIs are not copyrighted, because they can be compared with "the method of organizing books in the library: you can protect the content of books with copyright, but not the method of organizing them."

Oracle does not want to accept the fact that it is deprived of copyright on the Java API. In February 2013, the company filed an appeal, accompanied by its argument that Google’s API cloning is how to copy chapter titles and headings from the Harry Potter book, rephrase the text and give the result for the original work. Some independent copyright and related rights experts agree that the Oracle strategy might work.
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Oracle requires about a billion dollars from Google for damages. But it's not about the money. If Judge Alsup’s initial decision is revised, it could lead to major changes in the entire software industry. Many free projects are based on APIs that have been cloned from other systems for compatibility and ease of training. For example, the Cisco CloudStack cloud service is cloning the Amazon Web Services APIs, and this is not the only example, it happens all the time.

On the other hand, if the appellate court decides in favor of Oracle, Google may already appeal here, raising the matter to the level of the US Supreme Court.