Justices wary of upending tech industry in Google v. Oracle Supreme Court fight

Things got technical at the Supreme Court as the justices heard arguments from Google and Oracle in a blockbuster copyright dispute that has captivated Silicon Valley for a decade. The dispute concerns about 11,500 lines of code that Google used to build its popular Android mobile operating system, which were replicated from the Java application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems. Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2010, sued Google shortly afterward, arguing that Google’s use of the code violates its ownership rights. Google, on the other hand, has said the code it copied was purely functional, and that its own engineers authored all of Android’s code that could be said to be creative and subject to copyright protection. At the end of an hour and a half of arguments, Justice Stephen Breyer, who at one point read aloud some code, seemed to be the only sure vote. The liberal justice appeared to lean toward Google. Several of the other justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, suggested they were sympathetic to Oracle’s copyright claims. Still, they appeared reluctant to rule in Oracle’s favor.