Oracle vs Google, No Perks for Java: Judge weaves a trial

Judge William Alsup knows how to play a bluff. Presiding in the Oracle v Google trial, where the search giant was accused of violating Oracle's copyrights and patents, he had instructed the jury to assume that mimicking work-alike functionality can violate copyright even where it does not involve copying specific programming code. The tech crowd was aghast. Should the jury find in favour of Oracle, many fretted, this would forever change the way software is developed, since much development relies on getting different code to perform similar tasks ...

The full 41-page ruling makes for a riveting read. In part that is because the judge has, as he noted during in the trial, written programming code himself—and learned some of the Java language under consideration to test the claims Oracle's lawyers were making about the nature of work-alike functionality. What Oracle attempted to do, it appears, is apply principles of patents (which protect methods) to copyright (which protects specific creative instantiations).

Oracle plans to appeal, but the judge weaved the trial and his decision so intricately that there seems to be little scope for a higher court to find errors.