Supreme Court Backs Google in Copyright Fight With Oracle

The 6-to-2 ruling ended a decade-long battle over whether Google had improperly used Java code in its Android operating system.

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Google in a long-running copyright dispute with Oracle over software used to run most of the world’s smartphones. The 6-to-2 ruling, which resolved what Google had called “the copyright case of the decade,” spared the company from having to face claims from Oracle for billions of dollars in damages. The case, Google v. Oracle America, No. 18-956, concerned Google’s reliance on aspects of Java, a programming language, in its Android operating system. Oracle, which acquired Java in 2010 when it bought Sun Microsystems, said that using parts of Java without permission amounted to copyright infringement. Google responded that free access to the software interfaces in question were crucial to the innovation economy.