Google’s fair use victory is good for open source

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

Pamela Samuelson is a longtime professor of IP and cyberlaw at the University of California-Berkeley, and she also chairs the board of the Authors Alliance. Her views do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica, and they've been republished here with her permission.

Oracle and Google have been fighting for six years about whether Google infringed copyright by its use of 37 of the 166 packages that constitute the Java API in the Android software platform for smart phones. Last week, Google won a jury trial verdict that its reuse of the Java API elements was fair use.

Let me first explain the main facts and claims in the lawsuit, and then why Google's fair use victory is a good thing not only for Google but also for open source developers, for software developers more generally, and for the public.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments