Oracle win could become a nightmare for the developer and programmers but jury announced today that implementation of 37 JAVS APIs in Android by Google is a fair use.On the other hand attorneys have said that they would appeal the this decision.
A Google Spokesperson talking to media said that “Today’s verdict that Android makes fair use of Java APIs represents a win for the Android ecosystem, for the Java programming community, and for software developers who rely on open and free programming languages to build innovative consumer products,”.
If this case is won by the Oracle owner of Java Programming language, it could produce a great fear for programmers and developers to use the other companies APIs – which is a normal and widespread practice among the software development community.
This whole case of suing Google by Oracle began in 2010, when Oracle claimed that Google has implemented code from the Java programming language which is owned by Oracle without the permission. Initially it was found that Google has not violated Oracel’s copyright, but decisions got overturned court found that APIs in question are copyright able. later this case was turned to the question of fair use, which under certian conditions allow user to use the copyrighted material.
In commercial products Oracle licenses the usage Java, but the argument was provided by the Google that implementation of the 37 APIs in question comes under the fair usage. If Oracle had won this could provide roughly $9 billion in damages.
Mitch Stoltz who is a senior staff attorney in Electronic Frontier Foundation who deals copyright issues said that “I think it’ll give software developers a bit more confidence that re implementing APIs is not something that’s going to get them sued.”
Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page said in a testimony “I don’t accept the definition of code includes API declarations,” he told the jury. Page also called his engineers’ use of the Java declaring code in Android “widespread industry practice.”
