* Purpose of the use -- Gogole's use wasn't transformative, in fact it was explicitly the opposite.
* Nature of the use -- Google could try to argue that their use was for the public benefit, but since the Android platform exists for business interests it probably shouldn't qualify.
* Amount and Substantiality -- Google basically took it all. There's no case here. They took not just the signatures but their semantic meaning (i.e. the thing that makes an API useful) as well. There's really not much else to an API design document.
* Effect on the market -- This one should be obvious. This directly hurts Oracle. Their implementation diminishes the market for the original. At least that's what their lawyer claims.
> Google concedes it put that code to the same use in the competing Android platform, for what this Court already has deemed "entirely commercial" purposes. And Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters.
The work Oracle copyrighted (and registered) was their implementation of Java SE as a whole, method bodies and all. Google copied only the interface.
If someone copies a paragraph of my novel and claims fair use, I won't get very far on the amount-and-substantiality front by saying "but they basically took all of the part that they copied".
> If someone copies a paragraph of my novel and claims fair use, I won't get very far on the amount-and-substantiality front by saying "but they basically took all of the part that they copied".
It's more like they copied the whole table of contents and rewrote your novel in their own words with all the headings copied verbatim. Good luck with claiming fair use on that.
I think it depends if you consider the part that was copied to be a standalone work. The fact that Google is able to create a separate implementation based only on the API design documents seems to suggest that it's a separate work that has meaning unto itself.
Would you make the same argument if you copied the entire forward from a novel?
A foreword is a lot more substantial all by itself.
Imagine if they copied the index of a textbook. It's possible to create a complete and compatible textbook using only that structure, but very few people would call it a separate work that has meaning unto itself.
In that case I think I would try the argument. But if I were on the jury I wouldn't be thinking "there's no case here".
If I understand how appealing jury decisions works, it isn't going to be anywhere near good enough for Oracle to argue that a reasonable jury might have decided the other way.
Your argument begs the question. You might as well argue "The fact that you were able to write a new novel around the word 'the' that you copied from my novel seems to suggest that the word 'the' is a separate work that has meaning unto itself."
If you write a function int makeHash(int) which computes a trapdoor function, and I write a function int makeHash(int) which prepares breakfast and returns a status code, then they have the same signature but different semantic meaning.
* Nature of the use -- Google could try to argue that their use was for the public benefit, but since the Android platform exists for business interests it probably shouldn't qualify.
* Amount and Substantiality -- Google basically took it all. There's no case here. They took not just the signatures but their semantic meaning (i.e. the thing that makes an API useful) as well. There's really not much else to an API design document.
* Effect on the market -- This one should be obvious. This directly hurts Oracle. Their implementation diminishes the market for the original. At least that's what their lawyer claims.
> Google concedes it put that code to the same use in the competing Android platform, for what this Court already has deemed "entirely commercial" purposes. And Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters.