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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I suddenly have a lot more faith in the courts and juries to land sane verdicts in technology trials. Still sad that it takes a billion dollar company to be able to stand up to this (as anybody smaller would be crushed by the trial expense) but let's celebrate it none the less.

Any lawyers around? I wonder if Google can claim legal expenses back from Oracle.

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Under the Copyright Act, the judge has discretion to award attorney fees to the prevailing party. [0]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/505

> Under the Copyright Act, the judge has discretion to award attorney fees to the prevailing party. [0]

I think that'd be good for the ecosystem as it'd send a message that there will be consequence for pursuing frivolous lawsuits.

I don't think it's fair to call this law suit frivolous.

From a developer perspective, the ideal and just end result has always seemed rather obvious. However, the multi-year history of this case demonstrates the correct legal answer not so obvious, at least from a legal perspective.

For example, settling the issue on fair use was definitely not how most people thought/hoped this would shake out way back in the beginning of the law suit(s).

If I learned one thing from the SCO mess, it's that a high-powered law firm can take absolutely no case and make it last at least a decade.

This law suit is frivolous based on the assumption that APIs are not copyrightable (a very reasonable assumption in 2009).

But the result of the trial was that they are copyrightable, so clearly it wasn't frivolous.

The appellate court ruled that the law is that APIs are copyrightable, and sent it back. The jury decision here was that Google made fair use of a copyrighted API, not that APIs aren't copyrightable.

It may be frustrating when these sorts of cases wind their way slowly and expensively through the legal system only to achieve (sometimes) obviously correct results. However, that's actually a much better thing than having a person or persons handing down a decision based on what seems obviously right.

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