Oracle Appeals Against Google's Android Ruling

Google's use of Java in Android was "decidedly unfair".

Oracle has appealed against its infringement battle loss with search engine giant Google, with the former stating that the judge was wrong in his ruling.

It filed an appeals brief with the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with the company stating that Google's use of Java in its mobile platform Android was "decidedly unfair." Oracle said that copyright is designed to protect all types of work including "a short poem or even a Chinese menu," but what the firm created in Java was "vastly more original, creative, and labor-intensive."

Oracle had sued Google in 2010 for allegedly infringing on copyrights it held on 37 Java application programming interfaces in Android. It claimed that Google knowingly utilized the APIs without a license from Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle back in 2010 for $7.4 billion. Either way, the Java developer was ordered to pay $4 million for Google's legal expenses.

During May 2012, a jury ruled a partial verdict in Oracle's favor by stating that Google infringed upon the overall structure, sequence and organization of Java's language. The presiding judge, William Alsup, soon after ruled that APIs were not copyrightable and then ended Oracle's claim.

The appeals filing, however, sees Oracle arguing that Alsup was wrong in his assessment. Oracle attorney E. Joshua Rosenkranz made his point by creating a hypothetical author named "Ann Droid." In the hypothetical example, he said that person received an advance copy of a Harry Potter book and copied all the chapter titles, the topic sentences of each paragraph, and then paraphrased the rest.

"Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid -- and has offered the same defenses," he wrote. Google hasn't publicly commented on the appeal brief but is said to be preparing to file its own response during May 2013.

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