Big Law
Google Wins Multibillion-Dollar Supreme Court Case Against Oracle
In the multi-billion Supreme Court clash between two titans of tech, Google emerged as the victor on Monday.
In a 6-2 opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court said that Google’s use of 11,000 lines of code — copied without permission from Oracle’s Java program — to create the Android smartphone operating system — constitutes fair use as a matter of law and does not require compensation.
“We assume, for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable. But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law,” Breyer wrote.
The decision reversed a lower court ruling in favor of Oracle, which had sought $9 billion in damages from Google for copyright infringement.
