Big Win For Fair Use: Jury Says Google’s Use Of Java API’s Was Fair Use… On To The Appeal

This is somewhat surprising, but good: after a few days of deliberation, the jury in the redo of the Oracle v. Google case concerning Google’s use of Java’s APIs in Android has resulted in a jury verdict finding that Google’s use was allowed as fair use. There’s not much to unpack here beyond what we’ve already written about the case. The jury form was a simple question of whether or not the use was covered by fair use, with a "Yes" check box meaning "finding for Google" and a "No" check box finding for Oracle The jury checked yes.

So, a few quick thoughts:

All things considered this is a good ruling in that it doesn’t lead to a crazy situation that undermines the reimplementation of APIs and other structures in different software, so *phew*.
This still sucks because fair use was the wrong vehicle. The APIs never should have been considered copyright-eligible in the first place, just as the judge in the original trial explained in his very detailed opinion. It’s only because an excessively confused federal circuit appeals court mucked things up, that the case had to go back down and be redone over fair use.
The trial itself was a weird one, because they weren’t really allowed to talk about the first trial and how a very large number of people in the tech industry didn’t think that APIs were covered by copyright at all. So that resulted in some weird conversations to explain why no one really thought this was infringing. They couldn’t say no one thought APIs were covered by copyright, so they had to talk about "open" and "free" in ways that were slightly misleading.
If anything, this may the most important fair use case to turn on factor 2, "the nature of the copyrighted work." That’s a factor that rarely is a very big deal, but without being able to (re)challenge the copyrightability, the focus was mostly on the nature of APIs and how the tech industry viewed them as free to be reused.
Of course, no matter what the verdict was there would be an appeal, and that’s absolutely true. Oracle will appeal. But it does make it more difficult to appeal. Oracle will have to challenge specific aspects of things, and will likely focus on the jury instructions, which it will argue unfairly biased the jury or something along those lines.
The Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is still a disaster, and while I hope they don’t, there’s still a decent chance they’ll end up siding with Oracle on appeal. Remember, CAFC is a court that normally focuses on patent laws and has a long and disgraceful history of loving to expand intellectual property and believing, incorrectly, that any kind of use is "theft."
But, in the meantime, this at least lifts something of a cloud over the industry, and we can hope that (1) CAFC will get it right and if they don’t (2) that the Supreme Court will fix it, rather than ignore it, next time around.