By Jessica Gresko
WASHINGTON (AP) --Tech giants Google and Oracle are clashing at the Supreme Court in a copyright dispute that's worth billions and important to the future of software development.
The case before the justices Wednesday has to do with Google's creation of the Android operating system now used on the vast majority of smartphones worldwide. Google says that to create Android, which was released in 2007, it wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used 11,330 lines of code and an organization that's part of Oracle's Java platform.
Google has defended its actions, saying what it did is long-settled, common practice in the industry, a practice that has been good for technical progress. But Oracle says Google "committed an egregious act of plagiarism" and sued, seeking more than $8 billion.
The case has been going on for a decade. Google won the first round when a trial court rejected Oracle's copyright claim, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. A jury then sided with Google, calling its copying "fair use," but an appeals court disagreed.
Because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, only eight justices are hearing the case, and they're doing so by phone because of the coronavirus pandemic. The questions for the court are whether the 1976 Copyright Act protects what Google copied, and, even if it does, whether what Google did is still permitted.
Oracle, for its part, says the case is simple.
"This case is about theft," Oracle's chief Washington lobbyist, Ken Glueck, said in a telephone interview ahead of argument. He compared what Google did to plagiarizing from someone else's speech. When you plagiarize one line from a speech, he said: "That's a plagiarized speech. Nobody says, 'Oh, well, it was just one line.'"
But Google's Kent Walker, the company's chief legal officer, said in an interview that Google wrote "every line of code we possibly could ourselves."
"No one's ever claimed copyright over software interfaces, but that's what Oracle is claiming now," Walker said.
Microsoft, IBM and major internet and tech industry lobbying groups have weighed in — in favor of Google.
The Trump administration, the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America are among those supporting Oracle.
The case is Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., 18-956.
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More