Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 33

Cite as:  593 U. S. ____ (2021) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

well be insubstantial.  But if that single sentence set forth
one of the world’s shortest short stories—“When he awoke, 
the dinosaur was still there.”—the question looks much dif-
ferent, as the copied material constitutes a small part of the 
novel but the entire short story.  See A. Monterroso, El Di-
nosaurio, in Complete Works & Other Stories 42 (E. Gross-
man transl. 1995).  (In the original Spanish, the story reads:
“Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.”)

Several features of Google’s copying suggest that the bet-
ter way to look at the numbers is to take into account the 
several  million  lines  that  Google  did  not  copy.    For  one 
thing, the Sun Java API is inseparably bound to those task-
implementing lines.  Its purpose is to call them up.  For an-
other, Google copied those lines not because of their crea-
tivity,  their  beauty,  or  even  (in  a  sense)  because  of  their 
purpose.  It copied them because programmers had already
learned  to  work  with  the  Sun  Java  API’s  system,  and  it 
would  have  been  difficult,  perhaps  prohibitively  so,  to  at-
tract programmers to build its Android smartphone system
without them.  Further, Google’s basic purpose was to cre-
ate a different task-related system for a different computing
environment (smartphones) and to create a platform—the
Android platform—that would help achieve and popularize
that  objective.    The  “substantiality”  factor  will  generally 
weigh in favor of fair use where, as here, the amount of cop-
ying was tethered to a valid, and transformative, purpose. 
Supra, at 25–26; see Campbell, 510 U. S., at 586–587 (ex-
plaining that the factor three “enquiry will harken back to
the first of the statutory factors, for . . . the extent of per-
missible copying varies with the purpose and character of 
the use”).

We  do  not  agree  with  the  Federal  Circuit’s  conclusion 
that Google could have achieved its Java-compatibility ob-
jective by copying only the 170 lines of code that are “neces-
sary to write in the Java language.”  886 F. 3d, at 1206.  In