Lawyers for Oracle and Google gave their closing arguments Monday in a jury trial between the Silicon Valley giants over the use of Java software code that could have repercussions across the broader high-tech industry.
At stake is Oracle's claim that Google copied its Java code without obtaining a license to create the Android mobile operating system. The closing arguments in a San Francisco federal courtroom mark the end of the first phase of the trial, which covered alleged copyright infringement by Google. Following jury deliberations Judge William Alsup said could take up to a week, the two companies will contest Oracle's claims regarding alleged patent violations by Google.
The trial saw Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison and Google chief executive Larry Page take the stand earlier this month, while Android chief Andy Rubin, former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz, and Oracle chief financial officer Safra Catz were among the other high-profile names giving testimony in recent weeks.
Oracle counsel Michael Jacobs told the jury that despite its protestations, "Google executives knew this day would come," according to CNET. The digital smoking guns— "email after email" from Google executives like Rubin that discussed the licensing Google allegedly needed to obtain from Sun Microsystems, the original owner of Java which was acquired by Oracle in January 2010.
Jacobs also said that Google's contention that Java was not suited for a smartphone operating system before Android came along was off base, the tech site reported. To the contrary, the Oracle attorney said Research in Motion, Nokia, and others had used Java in smartphones, but now Android has "foreclosed the market, blocking the opportunity for Java to move into smartphones."
The Oracle lawyer dismissed Google's argument that its appropriation of Java code for its OS fell under fair use guidelines. Rather than taking from the This article is cool37 Java APIs in dispute in the lawsuit and using that code for "new and different purposes" in accordance with fair use guidelines, Google simply copied Java class libraries and reclassified them as Android class libraries, Jacobs said.
Later in the day, Google's Robert Van Nest called on jurors to disregard Oracle's claims about fair use and instead seek to understand how Google's use of Java APIs was legitimate under fair use standards, ZDNet reported.
Van Nest cited testimony given last week by Schwartz, who claimed that Java APIs could be used for other software without a license as long as the resulting product wasn't branded Java.
The Google attorney asked the jury to consider that Sun had made the Java programming language freely available to the public and publicly approved of the use of Java in Android, and that Google adhered to fair use guidelines in developing Android with the free and open source code in Java APIs.
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