November 2019

27 Nov 19


On November 15, 2019, the US Supreme Court granted certiorari in (ie, agreed to hear the final appeal of) Oracle v. Google, with dramatic global  implications for interoperability, innovation, and competition. The culmination of nine years of furiously fought litigation between two technology titans, this case concerns nothing less than the scope of copyright protection for software and the freedom to interoperate.

In 2007, Google developed the Android smartphone operating system to be compatible with the Java platform by copying the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) originally developed by Sun Microsystems, the company that invented Java. By leveraging the existing massive Java developer base, Google’s actions made it easy for Java developers to write applications for Android.