Google warns: innovation will be stifled if Supreme Court rules against it

A long-running legal battle between Google and Oracle has finally made it to the Supreme Court. In August 2010, Oracle accused Google of using more than 37 Java APIs, and 11 lines of source code from Oracle's Java software without permission in the Android operating system. APIs, or Application programming interfaces, allow software to communicate with each other. The suit was filed just seven months after Oracle acquired Java by closing on its purchase of Sun Microsystems, a transaction that closed on January 27, 2010. Oracle is seeking at least $8.8 billion from Google.
Google says that if Oracle wins, computer innovation will be "stifled"
Google submitted a filing to the Supreme Court today that once again argues that what it did was legal to use APIs taken from Java to help make it easier for Android to communicate with other software. Google warns the Supreme Court that if it rules against the company, innovation will be "stifled" in the computer industry. The company's Senior Vice President of Global Affairs and its Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker wrote on a blog post today that "We’re asking the Court to reaffirm the importance of the software interoperability that has allowed millions of developers to write millions of applications that work on billions of devices. As Microsoft said in an earlier filing in this case: Consumers ... expect to be able to take a photo on their Apple phone, save it onto Google’s cloud servers, and edit it on their Surface tablets."
The Supreme Court will have to make the tough decision, like the lower courts before it did, whether APIs can be protected by copyrights. If the answer is "yes," the next question is whether or not it is fair to allow the use of these legally protected interfaces to create new technologies. Google's Walker sums up this aspect of his company's arguments with an easy to understand scenario. "Imagine a world in which every time you went to a different building, you needed a different plug to fit the proprietary socket, and no one was allowed to create adapters."
Walker writes that Google is looking forward to making its case before the Supreme Court this coming spring. He also explains the importance of this long-running case by stating, "Open interfaces between programs are the building blocks of many of the services and products we use today, as well as of technologies we haven’t yet imagined. An Oracle win would upend the way the technology industry has always approached the important issue of software interfaces. It would for the first time grant copyright owners a monopoly power to stymie the creation of new implementations and applications. And it would make it harder and costlier for developers and startups to create more products for people to use."