Oracle is fighting against Google’s ‘fair use’ ruling made by Judge William H. Alsup back in June. Judge Alsup ruled that the 37 Java APIs that Google supposedly infringed on were not copyrightable because anybody could write code that carries out similar functions to the APIs. Oracle, however, wants the court to keep pursuing the case because it believes there is strong evidence that Google infringed on its copyrights.
Oracle filed the appeal on Monday to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit asking the Federal Circuit to overturn both Judge Alsup’s ruling and the jury’s verdict that Google was in “fair use” of Java’s API. It looks like when Judge Alsup said Oracle was “overblowing” the case, he wasn’t not joking. At this point, it seems like they’re just beating a dead horse.
Oracle claims that Android was incompatible with Java and that it had fragmented the platform. It also said that Android offered a Java-friendly programming environment without paying any licensing fees, which in turn hurt Oracle’s business opportunities in the mobile market.
Oracle’s attorney, E. Joshua Rosenkranz, then told a story of “Ann Droid” who gets herself an advanced copy of a Harry Potter book. She copies all of the chapter titles and topic sentences from the book, but paraphrases the rest of the work. In her defense, it was fair use because she wrote most of the book herself.
Chances are that this appeal will go in favor of Google, just like all of Oracle’s other cases against Google. Oracle is very determined to win however, and has hired a team of 28 lawyers to work on the appeal. For those of you who aren’t up-to-date on the Oracle vs. Google lawsuits, you can read about them in the timeline below. We’re pretty sure we know what the end result will be already.
[via Business Insider]
if Oracle attorneys keep telling that story, they’ll lose again 😀