US Supreme Court puzzled over Google, Oracle high tech copyright clash

The landmark copyright lawsuit between tech giantsGoogle andOracle has puzzled and divided theSupreme Court of theUnited States of America.

Trying to resolve an $8 billion-plus copyright dispute, the shorthanded court, down one justice following last month's death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,heard oral arguments on Wednesday.

The case has been revived afterGoogle's appeal to reviewa lower court rulingin whichOraclesoughtdamages from the company forcopying thousands of lines of computer code from its popular Java programming language without a license in order to make Android, a competing platform that has harmedOracle's business.

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To create Android, which was released in 2007, Google wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organisation that's part of Oracle's Java platform.

Google says what it did is long-settled, common practice in the industry, a practice that has been good for technical progress. And it says there is no copyright protection for the purely functional, noncreative computer code it used, something that couldn't be written another way. But Oracle says Google committed an ''egregious act of plagiarism''and sued.

A jury cleared Google in 2016, but the USCourt of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned that decision in 2018, finding that Google's inclusion ofOracle's software code in Android was not permissible under UScopyright law.

Google lawyer Thomas Goldstein told the justices that the disputed Java code should not receive copyright protection because it was the "the only way" to create new programs using the programming language.

Chief Justice John Roberts suggested Google still should have paidOraclefor a license to Java.

"Cracking the safe may be the only way to get the money that you want, but that doesn't mean you can do it," Roberts said.

Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned Goldstein on whether Google had simply piggybacked onOracle's innovation.

Gorsuch asked, "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?"

Oracleand Google, two California-based technology giants with combined annual revenues of about $200 billion, have been feuding sinceOraclesued for copyright infringement in 2010 in federal court in San Francisco.

Google has said the shortcut commands it copied into Android do not warrant copyright protection because they help developers write programs to work across platforms, a key to software innovation.