Court cases that stormed the technology universe in 2012
Photo: Google's Dr. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin: Time to celebrate?
A high profile copyright battle that continued for about two years, another one involving Oracle, has ended, albeit momentarily. The U.S. District Court of Northern California has found Google ‘not guilty’ of infringing on Oracle’s copyrights.
Oracle sued Google in August 2010 for infringing its copyrights on Java programming language which the latter used in Android operating system. Google made use of Java application programming interfaces (APIs) while building Android. With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009, the copyright and patents to Java were transferred to Oracle.
Earlier, in a partial verdict, the jury had found that Google copied the “overall structure, sequence and organization” of 37 Java application programming interfaces (APIs). However, in the latest verdict the Jury has ruled that since the APIs are free for everybody to use under the Copyright Act, Google cannot not be considered guilty of copyright violation.
For Google, and all the lovers of Android, it is time to celebrate. For Oracle, it plans to appeal against this verdict.
Read the background to this trial
<< Development deal snapped |
IP trial resumes >> |