“While patents are the most important part of Oracle’s lawsuit against Google, the copyright infringement part shouldn’t be underestimated. Google is currently trying to get rid of it on summary judgment, but Oracle defends its related claims,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.
“One of Oracle’s allegations of direct copying of code from the Java codebase into Android is a function that is in the Arrays class of Java and resurfaced in the Android TimSort class,” Mueller reports. “Google said (in its motion for summary judgment on the copyright infringement claims) that ‘[t]hose nine lines (which are the same in both of the Android files) implement a mundane utility function.’ So rather than denying that there was copying in play, Google argues that it should be allowed to copy such small amounts of code.”
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Mueller writes, “It’s quite interesting to see that the copied code segment shown [in the full article] was created by a Google engineer — not a third party — and the said engineer (Joshua Bloch, who previously worked for Sun and whose title at Google used to be, or still is, Chief Java Architect) even admitted in a deposition that he likely had access to the original Sun code when he wrote that code segment.”
Much more in the full article here.