Oracle's (News 
- Alert) year-long copyright infringement suit against Google took an interesting turn over the weekend when the Java owner objected to Google's (News - Alert) request for a summary judgment that would throw out much of the case.
The two companies have been battling in court over the last year after Oracle claimed that Google deliberately infringed on its Java technology to create Android (News - Alert), which currently accounts for more than 43 percent of the worldwide smartphone OS market.
Just last month, Google filed a motion that said it can't be liable for copying the 37 Java APIs in question because application programming interfaces are not subject to copyright law.
Oracle rejected this argument in a counter brief over the weekend, noting that “no court has ever found that the APIs for a complex software platform like Java are ineligible for copyright protection.”
In addition, Oracle accused Google of severely fragmenting Java by picking and choosing the APIs that it wanted, and then incorporating other incompatible APIs into Android.
Oracle then cast Google as a hypocrite for demanding that its OEMs “maintain the full set of Android APIs - including the 37 APIs it copied from Oracle - to prevent fragmentation of the Android platform.”
In a separate transcript filed Saturday, Oracle Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven said that Android has basically boxed Oracle out of the highly lucrative smartphone market due to the negative impact on Java, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“I don't believe that there is a strategy that we could adopt at this point... to displace Android given that they've sucked all...the air out of the room for Java on smartphones,” Screven noted during his deposition.
Google will now have the opportunity to respond to Oracle's objection claims in a case that will have a serious impact on the software space as a whole. If the court finds that APIs are copyrightable, dozens of other patent infringement lawsuits are bound to pop up.
Google has been very outspoken about its distaste for what Chief Legal Officer David Drummond calls a “hostile, organized campaign against Android.”
Just last month, a consortium of Google competitors – including Apple, Microsoft (News - Alert) and Oracle – banded together to purchase a myriad of wireless patents from bankrupt telecom Nortel. Google publicly suggested that the purchase was meant to “strangle” Android in court.
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Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
