Supreme Court sides with Google in copyright battle against Oracle

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled 6-2 for Google in its copyright fight with Oracle.

At issue were more than 11,000 lines of computer code, which Oracle claimed Google stole. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion that said Google’s copying was a “fair use” of Oracle’s computer code, which he said the justices assumed was capable of being copyrighted.

Justice Breyer wrote: “Several features of Google’s copying suggest that the better way to look at the numbers is to take into account the several million lines that Google did not copy.”

“Google copied those lines not because of their creativity, their beauty, or even (in a sense) because of their purpose,” Justice Breyer added. “It copied them because programmers had already learned to work with the Sun Java API’s system, and it would have been difficult, perhaps prohibitively so, to attract programmers to build its Android smartphone system without them.”

Justice Breyer was joined by the liberal bloc of justices as well as Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. The case was argued before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court and she did not participate in its ruling.

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Justice Clarence Thomas authored a dissent, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito, arguing the majority opinion that the copying of computer code was a fair use by Google was inconsistent with copyright protection for computer code provided by Congress.