Oracle demands $9.3 bn in damages for use of Java in Android

Ahead of a pretrial set for April, Oracle has demanded a sum of $9.3 billion in damages for the profits that Google made from Android.

For six years, Google and Oracle had wrangled over a copyright infringement lawsuit involving the use of Java APIs in Android.

Oracle actually was not Java's  original owner and creator, as the title belonged to the once prolific Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired in early 2010.

Almost immediately, Google was sued by Oracle for infringing on its copyright for Java.

The case essentially was not about the use of Java per se but some of the Java API and, consequently, the matter of copyright for such API.

Neither of the parties had emerged the clear winner yet since then. A jury initially ruled against Google, finding it guilty of infringement of at least 37 Java APIs. Trial judge William Alsup, however, overturned it, ruling that APIs were not subject to copyright law protections. The ruling was, in turn, overturned by an appeals court and the case back in his court.

Google appealed to the Supreme Court but, the country's highest court declined to hear the copyright lawsuit.

Google has always maintained that its use of Java APIs fell under fair use, which allowed for limited copying of copyrighted material. According to commentators, Google would  once again invoke that argument when the two tech giants faced each other in court again. For now, however, Google would need to  handle the whopping damages that Oracle was demanding.

That sum, according to Oracle's own damages expert, comprised $475 million of actual damages plus $8.83 billion from profits that Google made off Android,  including from mobile advertising and apps. Countering the claim, Google says that damages could only be computed from profits where the actual infringing code was used.

In this case, Google claimed that the 37 APIs it was said to be infringing made up only a small fraction of the total Android codebase. According to Google calculations, the damages amounted to $100 million only.

According to commentators when estimates of damages varied widely, juries often settled on a figure somewhere in between.

The case centered around Google's decision to use Java as the basis for its Android operating system without obtaining a license from Sun.

According to Oracle, Google had to make it to the market ahead of the competition and opted for Java as there were already millions of programmers familiar with the language.

Denying any wrongdoing, Google said its use of Java was covered by fair use, which allowed copying in limited cases. Factors included whether the use of the copyrighted work was transformative, which meant whether it turned it into something new; the amount of the original work that was copied, and the impact of the copying on the market value of the original work.

Google and Oracle are due in court 27 April for a pretrial hearing before the judge.