Oracle Corp.’s much-hyped copyright and patent case against Google Inc. threatened to become the biggest litigation flop to emerge from the smartphone wars. Now, thanks to an appellate turnaround by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Kirkland & Ellis, Oracle has managed to vindicate its intellectual property and put Google back on the defensive.
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit revived Oracle’s claims that Google infringed its copyrights when it incorporated parts of the Java programming language into the Android mobile operating system. In a ruling sure to reverberate through Silicon Valley and beyond, the court determined that the Java elements at issue—known as application programming interfaces, or APIs—deserve copyright protection.
