| > Google's arguments were already refuted in the earliest hearings. There's a reason this is going to the supreme court, the rulings didn't really match up with accepted evidence and testimony of experts in the court. This is not how appeals works. The Supreme Court is obliged to cover just two questions presented in the petition for cert: (1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use. The reason why it's hearing this case is because precedent on every circuit appeals court other than the federal circuit has answered "no" to the first question, and the precedent of fair use interpretation is such that CAFC overturning the jury verdict to rule not-fair-use is incredibly surprising. > The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability. That is factually incorrect. Whether or not Google did it for compatibility or interoperability is a factual determination. And facts are determined by jury, not by courts (and definitely not appeal courts). CAFC overturned the jury verdict, which found that Google's use was fair use. And Oracle does not contend that the jury was given bad instructions, which means that the appeals court can only consider if the jury's verdict was unreasonable. > Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it. I do not dispute this, and I don't think anyone disputes this. But the question is if it is legal for Google to do what it did... and the contention of quite literally everybody but Oracle is that it is. > Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it. Google was in talks with Sun, not Oracle. Sun didn't pursue Google because they couldn't find evidence of copyright violation. (As has been pointed out, many Sun engineers do suspect that Google didn't follow clean room implementation procedures strictly, but the amount of copied code that even Oracle could dredge up is 8 test files and a 10-line method called rangeCheck--not worth pursuing). If you're making an emotional case based on the investment put into Java, you should be honest that Oracle bought Sun to acquire Java, in large part to sue Google for the use of Java in Android. |