To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog: Earlier this month, in what many consider the copyright case of the decade, the Supreme Court released its much-anticipated decision in Google v. Oracle. In it, the Court ruled that Google’s copying of 11,500 lines of declaring code from Java SE for use in Google’s Android platform, was fair use. Having recently reviewed the history of the fair use defense in copyright infringement cases, we now turn to the case itself. Background of Google v. Oracle Before Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) created the Java language and platform, there was not an effective means for an application to run across multiple different operating systems—for example, Windows and Mac. Instead, application developers had to rewrite their application for each operating system. Sun Microsystems created the Java computer language and a collection of ready-to-use programs, i.e., modules that developers could incorporate into their own applications. Once written, these applications could be used on different operating systems, each running a specific implementation of the Java platform for that operating system. Each individual program or task, called a “method,” performs a unique function, like drawing a shape, solving a type of math problem, creating a user interface element, etc. Sun organized the methods into an intricate collection of “classes” that group related methods and define unique data types on which methods operate, and “packages” that group related classes. Together, these form the Java application programming interface (API) and the method-class-package organizational structure form part of the Java API’s “structure, sequence and organization,” or SSO. Sun created over 30,000 methods organized in 3,000 classes and 166 packages.