Oracle is not giving up hope of winning a copyright infringement case against Google over the latter's use of Java in Android, after losing two trials and an initial appeal.
It has filed an opening brief with a California appeals court, arguing that it lost previously because the court didn't allow it to present all the evidence it could have to make its case. The Register, which obtained a copy of the brief, pinpoints the core of Oracle's latest argument:
This time, Oracle argues that Google's wins should not stand up in a court of appeals.
"In the first trial in this case, the jury found that Google's Android software infringes Oracle's copyrights in the Java Standard Edition ('SE') platform but hung on the question of whether Google's copying was a fair use," Oracle said in its filing on Friday afternoon.
"After the trial, the district court held that the portions of Java that Google copied were not entitled to copyright protection and entered judgment for Google."
Oracle is also arguing that the first cases limited the scope of alleged copyright infringement to smartphones, while Google had targeted other platforms with Android, such as smart cars and TVs.
The appeals court will take up the case later this year. It's far from clear how much of a chance Oracle has this time, given the previous decisions against it, and Constellation is not in the legal predictions business anyway.
It's also far from clear how much interest this latest go-round will get from the media and industry observers, given the sheer length of the legal drama and saturation-level coverage it has received.
Nonethless, it remains a crucially important case to watch for one big reason: The question of whether APIs (application programming interfaces) are copyrightable. That they are has been a key contention of Oracle's all along and one backed by an appeals court ruling. However, a jury found that Google's use of the Java APIs were protected as "fair use" under the Copyright Act.
This time, Oracle doesn't have to prove that APIs are copyrightable, but it does have to convince the court that Google's use of them overstepped the legal line.
The jury who found in favor of Google last year did so based on four fair-use criteria, as well-described here by Ars Technica.
Google's victory on fair-use served as a counterbalance to the appeals court's ruling on the copyrightability of APIs, which was widely derided as terrible for innovation and interoperability, particularly in the world's fast-blossoming API economy. If Oracle manages to win this time, the waters will get quite muddied, and even if Google appeals, a final resolution could take years. Watch this space.
