Oracle Argues Copying Chapter Titles Is Copyright Infringement in New Google Lawsuit

It was inevitable; despite losing badly to Google, or perhaps because of it, Oracle is getting ready for another round in its patent and copyright lawsuit against the web giant.

Understandably, Oracle believes the court and the jury were wrong when they decided that Google had not infringed on any Oracle patents or copyright and that it had done nothing wrong, nothing it had to pay for, in any case.

So Oracle filed an appeal with the US Circuit Court of Appeals hoping to get the decision overturned and to get Google to fork a significant amount of money.

The crux of the argument is that Java APIs are copyrightable, despite what the judge in the first lawsuit believed. Judge William Alsup argued that Java APIs, which Oracle had accused Google of copying, aren't copyrightable.

Google copied the API structure, i.e. the methods and headers, but rewrote all of the actual code. This way, developers could write Java code just like they would for Oracle's Java virtual machine and have it work in Android as well.

In essence, that would be like an author using the same chapter titles, but otherwise rewriting the book, even if it's about the same things.

In fact, one Oracle lawyer used that very analogy to argue that, because Google copied the chapter titles, it was guilty of copyright infringement.

Thankfully, no matter how hard some groups would argue, rewriting a book is not copyright infringement (yet) – there would be no parodies if it were.

Google is expected to reply to the new lawsuit in May and the lawsuit will get underway after that. What this means is that these two companies are going to spend huge amounts of money on lawyers rather than spending them on innovation, something at least one of them is capable of.