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The US Supreme Court just handed Google a huge win in its massive Android lawsuit
A legal battle in progress for over a decade is over
It's been over a decade since Oracle first began its lawsuit against Google over the use of parts of the Java platform in Android. Today, the United States Supreme Court finally ended it, with Google being the long-protracted winner. While the relevant bits of Java haven't been used by Android in years, the end of this court battle sets a precedent in US copyright law that will be important for almost anyone making software platforms in the future.
TikTok temporarily avoids US ban thanks to last-minute ruling
The app is still scheduled to become non-functional on November 12th
If you had told me a year ago that an app primarily used for children to upload videos of themselves doing funny dances would be the center of a political storm, I'm not sure I would have believed you. The Trump administration announced last month that it planned to ban TikTok from the United States unless its ownership was divested, and just before the ban was scheduled to take effect, a judge has blocked the move.
YouTube is the latest company that thinks it's TikTok
Launching a new experience for short videos — as an early beta, of course
YouTube has always been the premier destination to watch music videos, skits, and how-tos, but consumers of shorter content found themselves drawn to competing apps. YouTube copied Instagram stories previously, and this new functionality seems targeted to TikTok teens. Now that TikTok's future is uncertain, YouTube is announcing the launch of Shorts, a new way to create and share videos of 15 seconds or less.
Oracle beats out Microsoft to buy TikTok's US operations
The deal reportedly won't be structured as an outright 'sale,' though
Oracle has been selected to purchase TikTok's US operations over Microsoft — though, according to The Wall Street Journal, the deal won't be structured as a sale. Minutes before the news broke, Microsoft revealed that it wouldn't be involved in any deal even though it reportedly had Trump's blessing ahead of the app's anticipated ban.
Due to the impending TikTok ban in the US, Microsoft (and Twitter) is already in talks with parent company ByteDance and interested in purchasing the US portion of the business — that would likely be the only way a ban could be averted. Now it looks like another player has entered the field, as the Financial Times reports that Oracle is also interested in purchasing the hit social network.
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Oracle's copyright suit against Google for using Java APIs in Android has been an ongoing feud since 2010, and the stakes are only about to get higher. The Federal Circuit denied Google's appeal Tuesday of a March decision that found Google's use of Oracle's Java APIs was not fair use. Now, Google has stated it will take the case to the Supreme Court.
New developments in the longstanding legal feud between Oracle and Google: a federal appeals court has reversed the 2016 ruling that found Google's use of Oracle's Java APIs in Android was fair use. The dispute has been ongoing since 2010.
According to reporter Sarah Jeong on Twitter, the jury in the long-awaited Oracle v Google trial regarding Google's use of Oracle's Java APIs has found that Oracle's claims for copyright infringement are not valid. Google's use of the APIs structure, sequence, and organization fell under fair use.
Android's rapid rise to the top of the mobile market was accompanied by a number of legal battles, and perhaps none of them was so central and so contentious as Oracle versus Google. The fight over the legality of patents and copyrights in some of the portions of Android that used allegedly proprietary Oracle-owned Java software has been raging since 2010, eventually being considered for review by the US Supreme Court before being bounced back to the lower appeals court. The fight was a constant, and sometimes dramatic, part of legal software news at one point.
FairSearch Europe—a coalition of Google competitors or legal adversaries including, among others, Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle—has filed a complaint with the European Union alleging that Google is abusing its dominant OS position in the mobile market to push its own set of apps.
Happy New Year! It's that time again; with the new year comes our new annual prediction post. I tackled this last year, and rather than do a bunch of crazy, pulled-from-thin-air predictions, I ended up with a link-filled research-fest for the year. It worked out pretty well, so that's what's on the docket for today. First though, I'll take a look and see just how many of last year's predictions and rumors came true, and provide some updates for the more important topics.
In case you forgot, Google was involved in a little spat with Oracle earlier this year, in which a jury decided that Oracle's patents were not infringed by Google, and a judge came to the conclusion that Oracle's assertion regarding API copyright infringement was untenable.
What an interesting turn of events - Oracle just sued a notorious patent troll Lodsys, seeking invalidation of four of Lodsys' patents. In fact, these are all the patents Lodsys owns - if Oracle wins, Lodsys will have nothing to threaten innocent developers with.
We're hearing via The Verge that Judge William Alsup has just handed down his decision on the copyrightability of Oracle's 37 Java API's, asserted by Oracle as having been infringed by Google in the Android operating system. This is probably the most important issue of the entire case. While a jury decided that Google did infringe Oracle's APIs as asserted by Oracle, that decision hinged on the assumption that the APIs were in fact copyrightable in the way Oracle had insisted they were.
Google and Oracle have been going at it for weeks now over both patent and copyright infringement claims made by the latter company. At least one issue is settled, though, as the jury on the case has decided that Google did not infringe any of Oracle's patents with Android. This is only a small part of Oracle's assault on Google. The larger issue is on the matter of copyright infringement, but at least on the patent issue, Google seems to be in the clear.
You've probably already read headlines in the last hour or two proclaiming that Google has "lost" its copyright case against Oracle, and in the strictest sense of the word, it has. Google lost on a number of counts, including the most important one, question one in the jury instructions. It also lost on a count involving nine lines of code that have long-since been removed from Android.
In a court filing last night demanding an early trial date for the ongoing Google v. Oracle patent litigation, Oracle claims that Android is now irreparably harming Java's market share in the mobile, TV, and tablet space. Oracle says that these are areas where Java "has traditionally been strong." News to us.
It looks like there's finally been a new development in the Oracle vs. Google fight. For those who may be out of the loop, Oracle (who owns Sun and the Java programming language) have had patent infringement and copyright lawsuits boiling against Google for quite some time now. The patent claims are essentially related to Google's use of Java in the Android platform. Oracle claims that Android includes code which violates patents gained through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
It certainly seems like it. Yesterday, Microsoft announced via blog that it had concluded negotiations with Samsung and reached a licensing deal for the same seven patents it previously licensed to HTC for Android (along with other, smaller Android manufacturers). There were rumblings about just what royalty rate Samsung is paying, but the guess is anywhere from $5 to $15 per handset (it's likely on a percentage-of-MSRP basis - so think about 1-3% per $500 MSRP phone).
When Google's General Counsel, David Drummond, posted the first real public response by the search giant to the intellectual property war being waged on Android, the techblogosphere just about peed their collective pants in excitement. Everyone loves a good flame war, it's true. Google called out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle - by name - publicly. It doesn't get much better than that.