Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 32.0

28 

GOOGLE LLC v. ORACLE AMERICA, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

skepticism about whether bad faith has any role in a fair 
use analysis.  510 U. S., at 585, n. 18.  We find this skepti-
cism justifiable, as “[c]opyright is not a privilege reserved 
for  the  well-behaved.”    Leval  1126.    We  have  no  occasion 
here to say whether good faith is as a general matter a help-
ful inquiry.  We simply note that given the strength of the
other factors pointing toward fair use and the jury finding
in  Google’s  favor  on  hotly  contested  evidence,  that  fact-
bound consideration is not determinative in this context. 

C. “The Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Used” 
If one considers the declaring code in isolation, the quan-
titative  amount  of  what  Google  copied  was  large.    Google
copied the declaring code for 37 packages of the Sun Java
API,  totaling  approximately  11,500  lines  of  code.  Those 
lines  of  code  amount  to  virtually  all  the  declaring  code
needed to call up hundreds of different tasks.  On the other 
hand, if one considers the entire set of software material in 
the  Sun  Java  API,  the  quantitative  amount  copied  was
small.  The total set of Sun Java API computer code, includ-
ing implementing code, amounted to 2.86 million lines, of 
which the copied 11,500 lines were only 0.4 percent.  App.
212. 

The question here is whether those 11,500 lines of code 
should be viewed in isolation or as one part of the consider-
ably greater whole.  We have said that even a small amount 
of copying may fall outside of the scope of fair use where the
excerpt copied consists of the “ ‘heart’ ” of the original work’s 
creative expression.  Harper & Row, 471 U. S., at 564–565. 
On the other hand, copying a larger amount of material can 
fall within the scope of fair use where the material copied
captures  little  of  the  material’s  creative  expression  or  is
central to a copier’s valid purpose.  See, e.g., Campbell, 510 
U. S., at 588; New Era Publications Int’l, ApS v. Carol Pub-
lishing Group, 904 F. 2d 152, 158 (CA2 1990).  If a defend-
ant had copied one sentence in a novel, that copying may