What happens after this, more appeals or is this like a proper static const readonly final?
This made me laugh out loud. Thanks
Most recently (that I'm aware of) is South Dakota v Wayfair. SCOTUS previously held that states couldn't impose sales tax on out-of-state companies. Subsequently, many states imposed "use taxes" which are essentially sales taxes paid by consumers on purchases they didn't pay sales tax already to get around this. Colorado passed a law which required out-of-state companies to essentially provide sales tax computation information to Colorado (but not sales tax itself), and Kennedy noted in his concurrence that maybe it was time to revisit the sales tax precedent. So South Dakota went ahead and passed a sales tax on out-of-state companies in direct violation of previous precedent, and SCOTUS promptly overturned that precedent when it heard the case.
It's worth noting that the higher court can reject your appeal. You're not entitled to be seen by the higher court, and if you can't come up with good grounds for why the lower court was wrong, the appeal will be rejected. The Supreme Court rejects a fair number of appeals (I think the majority of cases).
This is final though. There is no higher court than the Supreme Court to appeal to. At this point, the only reason it would change is if the laws change, or the Supreme Court reverses their decision later. It's extremely rare that they whole-hog reverse a precedent that they set, though.
My understanding is that a jury's primary task of deciding on the facts is final. The facts in a case like this seem to me to be things like deciding whether Oracle in fact holds the copyright, and whether Google's copy of the API is sufficiently similar for that copyright to apply to Google's copy.
Now as far as appeals go, you can appeal whether the trial was done properly, such that the jury was able to do its fact-finding job correctly. You can appeal what was then decided based on those facts (e.g. sentencing). You can appeal meta-questions, like whether a particular decision is a "finding of fact" or not to start with.
The question of whether "fair use" is the sort of thing that is decided by judge or jury is apparently somewhat contentious in this case; I just found https://www.law.uw.edu/wlr/print-edition/print-edition/vol-9... describing some of the issues there. Today's decision refers to this as well: it's (c) under "Held":
> (c) The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This ap- proach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense. Pp. 18–21.
which sure sounds like the Supreme Court effectively decided that the final determination of whether a use is "fair use" or not should be made by a judge, not a jury. Then they proceed to make that determination in this case in holding (d).
The idealized rule is that the jury is the final arbitrator of matters of fact, while judges (and appeal courts) decide matters of law. Ideals don't match reality cleanly, especially on matters like fair use which is "mixed fact and law." But additionally, you can sometimes appeal matters of fact by arguing that no reasonable jury could have reached the facts as it did (these are very rare, as I understand it, except in situations where mixed fact/law comes into play).
Some other points you're missing. First, you have to appeal on particular failures of law; you can't just appeal that you don't like the decision. In particular, if you try to appeal past the appeal court to a higher court, you can only make arguments that you made to the appeal court.
Another important thing is that appeal courts can push the case back down to the lower court to redecide based on clarifying law. That's what happened here, essentially. Google won on the trial, Oracle appealed saying that the judge incorrectly ruled that the API wasn't copyrightable (and the appeal court agreed with Oracle), which told the lower court to try it again with the correct ruling on API copyrightable. Google tried to appeal SCOTUS, who refused to hear it. Lower court had another jury trial, which found Google had fair use. Oracle appealed again to appeals court, which found that the jury couldn't have thought it fair use. Google appealed to SCOTUS, which just now disagreed with the appeal court.
"The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Reviewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of underlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense."
> Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know exactly what this means, other than the SCOTUS saying that it can override the jury decision.
SCOTUS altered the interpretation of the law, thus removing the legal justification for why the jury found infringement. Since they did not alter any findings of fact (they did not need to) this ruling is legally fine.
A jury can say you definitely did X, that court's judge can say X is illegal, and SCOTUS can then declare X is legal so it doesn't matter anymore if you did X.
The point in this case was, can Oracle overturn the "phone books cannot be Copyrighted" concept baked into tech law by the IBM v Compaq BIOS case. Seems the Supreme Court finally told Oracle the collection of method signatures from the Java base API are, indeed, a phone book.
Considering that the votes were not close, I don’t think Oracle would try again. Likely they will pursue a substantially different strategy to try and extort Google.
I'm pretty confident that Oracle rolls over on this issue permanently.