The tech industry breathed a collective sigh of relief on Monday after the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google in a 10-year legal fight that could have upended the rules of software design.
The landmark case, dubbed the "most important legal battle in technology," centered around Oracle's allegations that Google had stolen critical elements of its Java software to develop its Android mobile software.
Google said Oracle could not claim sole ownership of this type of code — known as an API, or application programming interface — which makes it possible for software programs to talk to each other.
On Monday, the court ruled 6-2 that Google's use of Java code, while developed by Oracle, "did not violate the copyright law" and was done under fair-use provisions. A win for Oracle would have set a strong legal precedent for whether it's possible to copyright certain code, which could have limited developers' ability to build and distribute software.
"Sanity has prevailed," James Gosling, Java's inventor, said on Twitter. "It's astonishing that this case even got started, much less that it ground on for more than a decade."
On Twitter, Alex Stamos, a former security chief at Facebook and now a professor of computer science at Stanford, said: "Thank you to the Supreme Court for saving all modern computing from an onslaught of copyright trolls."
—Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) April 5, 2021
Tim Sweeney, the CEO of the "Fortnite" maker Epic, also welcomed the ruling, writing on Twitter: "A great Supreme Court ruling in favor of software interoperability and developer freedom!"
—Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 5, 2021
David Heinemeier Hansson, the founder of Basecamp and a well-known critic of major tech firms like Google, said making APIs copyrightable "would have been a disaster."
—DHH (@dhh) April 5, 2021
More than two dozen parties, including tech companies and advocacy groups, voiced their support for Google's position in the legal battle, filing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in the run-up to the decision.
In a statement, Red Hat, the North Carolina software company owned by IBM, which has long supported Google in the case, said the Supreme Court's decision represented a "win for developers and the software industry."
It wrote: "It recognizes the critical role of software interfaces to promote innovation, interoperability, and new technologies. ... The issues in this case were complex and the Supreme Court is to be commended for wrestling with its decades long history."
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