Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc.
| Oracle v. Google | |
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| Court | United States District Court for the Northern District of California |
| Full case name | Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. |
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| Judge(s) sitting | William Haskell Alsup |
Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc. is a dispute related to Oracle's copyright and patent claims on Google's Android operating system. In May 2012, the jury in this case found that Google did not infringe on Oracle's patents, and the trial judge ruled that the structure of the Java APIs used by Google was not copyrightable. The parties agreed to zero dollars in statutory damages for a small amount of copied code. On May 9, 2014, the Federal Circuit partially reversed the district court ruling, ruling in Oracle's favor on the copyrightability issue, and remanding the issue of fair use to the district court. A petition for certiorari was denied by the United States Supreme Court on June 29, 2015. A second trial began May 9, 2016, in which Oracle sought US$8.8 billion in damages. On May 26, 2016, the trial jury sided in favor of Google, ruling the action to be fair use.
Java was originally developed at Sun Microsystems starting in 1991. It included a new programming language, a virtual machine, and a set of libraries for use with the language.
Android, Inc. was founded in 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White to develop a mobile phone platform.Google purchased Android in 2005 and continued developing the Android operating system. Google released a beta of the Android platform on November 5, 2007, noting that it would use some Java technologies. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz responded the same day, congratulating Google and saying they had "strapped another set of rockets to the community's momentum – and to the vision defining opportunity across our (and other) planets." Google released the Android software development kit (SDK) on November 12, 2007. Amongst other APIs, Android included Apache Harmony implementations of some of the APIs from the Java SE specification. Google negotiated with Sun about possible partnership and licensing deals for Java, but no agreement was reached.
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