Victory for Google in Java lawsuit

Google has secured a victory from the highest court in the United States in long-running litigation with the Oracle company that claims it stole thousands of lines of code from them to build the Android operating system.

Justice Stephen Bryar of the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-2 in favour of Google, asserting that the company's use of code was protected by America's 'fair use' laws.

"Google copied only what was needed to allow programmers to work in a different computing environment without discarding a portion of a familiar programming language," the judgement was quoted as saying by CRN. "Google's purpose was to create a different task-related system for a different computing environment (smartphones) and to create a platform — the Android platform — that would help achieve and popularize that objective.

Oracle had acquired Java from Sun Microsystems in 2010 and had demanded $9 billion from Google as compensation. Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs for Google, in a statement provided to CRN called the Supreme Court ruling a "victory" for "consumers, interoperability and computer science."

However Oracle has accused Google as litigating in a way that only a monopolist could. The company has also said that Google's unethical practices are now coming under the scanner with lawsuits in the EU and Australia.