Google has won a case put forward by Oracle on the open source Java software. Oracle had argued that Google had infringed on the Java patents, in coming up with the application programming interfaces used in the Android-run smartphones. Oracle is the maintainer of the Java programming language and also the organizer of the open source software. It claimed almost a billion dollars from Google as restitution. However, the court found out that Google had not infringed on the two patents that Oracle claimed. The court said that the particular elements that Google has replicated were open source and thus required no licensing. Google had copied nine lines of code from Java.
The court was quick to warn that the ruling does not mean that Oracle patented products could be copied without licensing. This will be stealing the products and may lead to prosecution. Some techniques however can be copied, since techniques are not copyrightable. This did not go down well with Oracle who has vowed to appeal the decision, saying that the use of its open source Java by Google was beyond fair use. The company continues to state that it will be committed in protecting Java first as a valuable development platform and secondly as an intellectual property asset.
The whole issue revolves round the deployment of the Java APIs in the building of the popular Android. Google used the APIs to create a customized Java. This was to enable the mobile devices to run many applications on the Internet at the same time.
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