Google is facing the biggest challenge in the history of existence: if the court ruled there was copyright infringement of Oracle's Java API, Google will have to pay compensation of $ 9 billion, nearly half of the total profit of the company obtained from the Android operating system (22 billion dollars).
The focus of this case is ambiguous terms related to the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems. Oracle acquired Sun in 2009, and just one year later, the giant database that specializes in this Google filed a lawsuit because of copyright issues related to Java. According to Oracle's allegations, Google copied Java APIs to Android's original. To counter, Google argued that the subject API products can not put under copyright protection.
Andy Rubin, the father Android.
Andy Rubin, the father Android.
To substantiate his argument, Oracle's legal team has recently published an email from 2006, when the father of Android, Andy Rubin acknowledges that the Sun Microsystems Java APIs were copyrighted. Email content includes:
"Ha, wish them luck. Java API sweet (probably referring to the core Java libraries from Sun / Oracle-employed) has been patented. Sun is the right decision and they will franchise JCK ".
Google's rebuttal argument seems quite weak. When the court hearing today, Rubin insisted on his statement means that the implementation stages (ie the specific source) is the Sun new copyright holder, while the APIs themselves (for declaration newspapers, providing features) are not.
This lawsuit remains unsettled, because Google also is offering another argument that both Google and any other companies should be entitled to use the API regardless of the owner of the intellectual property rights that API Who. If Google lost the case, the legal foundation of the hi-tech sector will be reversed and the developers will soon have to face a myriad of lawsuits claiming the API, which is the basis for the software interact with each other.
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