Last week the final judgment was entered by United States District Court Judge William Alsup in favor of Google following a jury trial in its long running legal battle with Oracle over Google’s use of bits of the JAVA programming language in Google’s Android smartphones. With a single check mark on a verdict form, the jury in Oracle America Inc. v. Google Inc. (United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. C 10-03561 WHA) found that Google’s use of certain JAVA components was “fair use.”

For six long years Google and Oracle had locked horns, including an earlier trial and trip up to the United States Supreme Court. Oracle, the owner of the JAVA programming language developed by Sun Microsystems, sought more than $9 billion dollars in damages, claiming that internet giant Google’s mobile smartphone operating system, Android, infringed portions of JAVA.

Oracle’s copyright claims included the contention that the Android operating system improperly utilized the structure, sequence and organization of certain components of the JAVA programming code known as “APIs,” essentially modular chunks of software that serve as the interface to certain program libraries implementing different software functions. Use of such publicly available APIs, short for “application programming interface,” is common place in the software industry. On this issue, the question for the jury was whether or not the use of JAVA’s APIs by Google amount to fair use under the law.

It has been observed that the use of APIs is arguably not particularly transformative, an important consideration in deciding fair use (for a broad primer on the boundaries and rules of fair use under copyright law, see my earlier postings Google’s Effort to Digitize Millions of Books is Fair Use and Using “Borrowed” Images in Your Blog). On the other hand, the open source nature of JAVA and the functionality of APIs — standardized code modules designed to function as interfaces with other code — arguably mitigate in favor of a finding of fair use. The jury agreed and vindicated Google’s position that it was fairly building on industry standards and open source protocols.

Of course, the battle will rage on in the appellate courts when Oracle likely appeals. Followers of IP law may be treated to more musings on the law of fair use by Ninth Circuit or even the United States Supreme Court.  Stay tuned.