Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
Appellate courts do not lightly overturn jury verdicts using highly fact-specific reviews of evidence. There is a reason they call a jury a &quot;trier of fact&quot;.<p>There is a reason for this: if it were the rule that an appellate court could easily step in and second-guess how a jury weighs evidence, there would be little room for finality with jury verdicts because lawyers are very skilled (and become very tiresome) endlessly arguing why this or that fact is better than another and why a court should weigh things differently than the way a jury did.<p>In this case, the Federal Circuit Court did what amounted a wholesale second-guessing of what the jury concluded about the facts here.<p>I am not saying the issues were not complex and that it had absolutely no basis for coming to different conclusions.<p>But the zeal with which this particular court upholds IP absolutism is truly a marvel.<p>This is the court that gave us the frivolous patent bonanza dating back to 1990s by which &quot;everything under the sun&quot; became patentable and many suffered for years from the consequent harm.<p>So too with the way it is handling copyright law in this Oracle&#x2F;Google dispute. Yes, by all means, let us protect the hell out of APIs and invite endless future litigation that ensures that easy connectivity in the computer world will no longer depend on engineers but on lawyers. And let us say that &quot;no reasonable jury&quot; could possibly conclude that copying even a tiny amount of code could possibly be &quot;quantitatively insignificant&quot; so as to shield the one doing the copying from claims of copyright infringement, all the better to ensure that future lawyers can conjure up infringement claims from all sorts of seemingly quantitatively trivial copying.<p>I deliberately exaggerate in how I characterize this decision knowing that it glosses over all sorts of fine points that are the subject of profound argument among lawyers. But I do so to capture the spirit of this decision and what decisions like this mean for computing generally.<p>Yes, a very broad theory of what is patentable can readily be defended in the name of protecting IP rights and lawyers can come up with endless arguments for why this should be so. So too can lawyers make convincing arguments for very broad theories of copyrightability and very narrow readings of fair use. In both cases, the law protecting IP gets an expansive reading.<p>Well, speaking as one who has tilled this soil for a long time and who very much supports and sees the need for strong support of IP rights, I can only say that the Federal Circuit Court has proven to be a largely counter-productive force in serving as a specialized court dealing with IP among federal courts. This ruling will do what its prior expansive reading of patent law did: it will set up a legal standard that invites lawyers and litigants to engage in endless second-guessing over copyright and fair use in areas of connectivity and inter-operability in the computing world and this in turn, as a standing invitation to litigate, cannot be good for future development.