After a more than a decade of litigation, on 5th
April the US Supreme Court handed down its
decision in Google v Oracle. Google won. Those who read the
decision might have been a little disappointed.
In what was widely considered to be the most significant
software copyright dispute of its time, the Court had two questions
to answer. But it sidestepped the important one and pinned its
conclusions on something much narrower.
This blog asks why.
The facts – a very potted history
We won't rehearse the facts in detail here, nor will we
labour the technical points about APIs (we covered both in a
post on this last year). This is the briefest of summaries,
taken from the Court's decision:
