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ARTICLE · 23 MAY 2014

Oracle vs Google – Software Copyright Case

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The US Court of Appeals ruled last Monday the 12th of May that software source code can qualify for copyright protection in certain circumstances.

MaltaIntellectual Property
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The US Court of Appeals ruled last Monday the 12th of May that software source code can qualify for copyright protection in certain circumstances.

In 2012, a district court held that Google could legitimately copy the function of computer code owned by Oracle because it did not copy the "specific code" that Oracle had used to achieve that functionality. It is an established principle of copyright law that it is only expression of an idea that is copyrightable, and not the idea itself. The district court held that the "declaring code" is not copyrightable because the idea and the expression have merged.

Whilst Google admitted that it had copied the underlying "declaring code" that is the basis for 37 of Oracle's Java application programming interfaces (APIs), it claimed that only the overlying "implementing code" which it created to ensure the interoperability of the technology with its Android system actually qualified for copyright protection.

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