Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 13

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

9 

Opinion of the Court 

Id., at 978.  As of 2015, Android sales produced more than 
$42 billion in revenue.  886 F. 3d, at 1187. 

In 2010 Oracle Corporation bought Sun.  Soon thereafter 
Oracle  brought  this  lawsuit  in  the  United  States  District
Court for the Northern District of California. 

II 
The case has a complex and lengthy history.  At the out-
set  Oracle  complained  that  Google’s  use  of  the  Sun  Java 
API violated both copyright and patent laws.  For its copy-
right claim, Oracle alleged that Google infringed its copy-
right by copying, for 37 packages, both the literal declaring 
code and the nonliteral organizational structure (or SSO) of
the API, i.e., the grouping of certain methods into classes
and  certain  classes  into  packages.    For  trial  purposes  the 
District Court organized three proceedings.  The first would 
cover the copyright issues, the second would cover the pa-
tent  issues,  and  the  third  would,  if  necessary,  calculate 
damages.  Oracle, 872 F. Supp. 2d, at 975.  The court also 
determined  that  a  judge  should  decide  whether  copyright
law  could  protect  an  API  and  that  the  jury  should  decide 
whether Google’s use of Oracle’s API infringed its copyright
and, if so, whether a fair use defense nonetheless applied. 
Ibid. 

After six weeks of hearing evidence, the jury rejected Or-
acle’s  patent  claims  (which  have  since  dropped  out  of  the
case).  It  also  found  a  limited  copyright  infringement.    It 
deadlocked as to whether Google could successfully assert
a fair use defense.  Id., at 976.  The judge then decided that,
regardless, the API’s declaring code was not the kind of cre-
ation to which copyright law extended its protection.  The 
court noted that Google had written its own implementing 
code,  which  constituted  the  vast  majority  of  its  API.  It 
wrote that “anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write 
his or her own code to carry out exactly the same” tasks that
the Sun Java API picks out or specifies.  Ibid.  Google copied