Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Oracle Lawsuit Against Google

Google New York — In this Dec. 4, 2017, file photo, people walk by Google offices in New York. Google is spending more than $1 billion to expand operations in New York City. Ruth Porat, senior vice president and chief financial officer at Google and Alphabet, said in a blog post Monday, Dec. 17, 2018, that Google is creating a more than 1.7 million square-foot campus that includes lease agreements along the Hudson River in lower Manhattan.

Arjun Singh is a producer for Boston Public Radio. A California native, Arjun moved to Boston to study international relations at Boston University. Prior to working at WGBH, Arjun worked at a tech company and for a political campaign.

November 18, 2019

Updated July 03, 2023

After nine years, tech giant Google scored a win when the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear its longstanding dispute with Oracle over the use of the coding language Java in their Android operating system.

Oracle sued Google in 2010 for copyright and patent infringement, and claimed that Google knowingly took code from an open source Java implementation called Apache Harmony and used it for commercial purposes without a license. Google argued their use of the code and Apache Harmony fell within fair use.

During an interview with Boston Public Radio on Monday, tech journalist Andy Ihnatko said if Oracle wins it could upend the entire tech industry, and the way developers create software.

“If this can stand, that means that any patent troll can basically rewind and say, ‘Oh look this person is using [our APIs]’ and say, ‘Well, you got the license to use the software, but not the API so ‘ah-ha,’” Ihnatko said. “[If Google wins], this way if a developer spends time investing in or her education to learn how to program in this language they’re not going to have to learn eighteen different dialects of it, they can just learn the one version of it.”