After four years of litigation, the legal fistfight between Google and Oracle will not be tried in the top court of the land. The Supreme Court decided today that it would not hear arguments in the ongoing battle over the Java APIs.
The fight between Google and Oracle centers on Google’s use of portions of Apache Harmony in the Android operating system. As Harmony is an open-source, Apache-backed effort to create a functionally compatible implementation of the Java language, its APIs and SDK, Oracle contended that Google violated its copyrights on the Java APIs.
(Related: Where we last left off in this conflict)
Google has argued that these APIs represent the public-facing end of Java as a whole, and that they are covered under fair use for reimplementation elsewhere. Without this fundamental protection, said Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the entire world of software would come tumbling down in a miasma of litigation.
In May of 2012, a Northern California district court jury agreed with Google on almost all counts, but deadlocked over whether the APIs were covered by fair use law.
However, two years later a higher court overturned this decision and said that Google had indeed violated Oracle’s copyrights by re-implementing Java APIs without permission.
Today’s decision by the Supreme Court means that Oracle and Google will be heading back to lower courts, where the 2014 decision will likely be appealed.
