Google vows to take Oracle spat to the Supreme Court after latest rejection

Carly Page
@CarlyPage_
29 August 2018

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GOOGLE HAS PLEDGED to take its eight-year battle with Oracle to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court declined to rehear the case.

The US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday rebuffed Google's request for it to rehear the case, CNET reports, in which it was determined that the company's use of Java APIs in the original Android code did not constitute fair use. Oracle has demanded $8.8bn in damages as a result of the ruling.

This means that, in order to save itself from becoming $9bn poorer, Google's only remaining option is to take its appeal to the Supreme Court, which the company says it plans to do following this latest ruling.

"We are disappointed that the Federal Circuit overturned the jury finding that Java is open and free for everyone," Google said.

"We will appeal to the Supreme Court to defend this principle against companies like Oracle, whose restrictive practices threaten to stifle the work of new generations of tech developers. This is an important issue with wide implications for developers and the digital economy."

Google is unlikely too optimistic though; the company sought help from the Supreme Court back in 2015 in an effort to overturn another federal appeals court ruling in favour of Oracle, but this request was denied.

"We are pleased that the Federal Circuit upheld the well-reasoned panel decision," Oracle said in response to Tuesday's decision. "We are now one step closer to putting our damages case before a jury."

Oracle's never-ending spat with Google first began back in 2010, with the former accusing the latter of copyright and patent infringement for its use of the Java programming language in its Android mobile operating system.

Oracle argues that while Java is open source, the APIs it provides in order to interface the code with that of other programmers are subject to copyright and therefore the billions of dollars that Google has made from Android is partly theirs.

Google, along with the rest of the software industry, sees this as a somewhat ridiculous premise, insisting that under fair use laws it didn't need a license for the open source software. µ