11,500 lines of Jave code: Google wins copyright fight with Oracle in court

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for Alphabet Inc.’s Google in a multibillion-dollar copyright battle with Oracle Corp. over how it built its Android smartphone-operating system.

The court, in a 6-2 opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, threw out a lower-court ruling for Oracle that said Google’s Android infringed its copyrights on the Java software platform. The high court said Google’s copying of some Java API code was fair use. APIs, or application programming interfaces, are prewritten packages of computer code that allow programs, websites or apps to talk to one another.

“Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law,” Justice Breyer wrote.