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ARTICLE · 20 MAY 2020

Google v Oracle: The Copyright Case Of The Decade

Kemp IT Law
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The Google v Oracle software copyright case in the US Supreme Court has been billed as the copyright case of the decade. Chris Kemp, Associate at Kemp IT Law, looks at the issues at stake.

United StatesIntellectual Property
Chris Kemp
Chris Kemp
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We billed Google v Oracle as the biggest item on the software legal agenda for 2020 in our 'Trends in IT Law: looking ahead to 2020' blog post back in January. The impact of COVID-19 on the US Supreme Court's March session means there is a chance the case will figure prominently in our 2021 update too. Few doubt the significance of Google v Oracle. For Google, a judgment in Oracle's favour would throw "a devastating one-two punch at the software industry" and "wreak havoc on copyright law".1 For Oracle, if the decision goes the other way, the Supreme Court will have sanctioned "an egregious act of plagiarism" and "rewritten" copyright law.2 In a broad update on the case this blog briefly recaps the story so far; looks in a bit more detail at a short computer program called the 'compareTo' method, which illustrates what Google copied from Java (and what it didn't); and then considers the questions put to the Supreme Court.

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