News just in from the courts of California says that Google has won the second phase its patent trial against Oracle.
Oracle filed a suit in October 2010 alleging that Google’s Android operating system infringes on patents relating to its programming language Java. Google responded by saying that not only did it not infringe on the patents, but that as Java is open source it cannot be patented.
The ten person jury has found that Google did not infringe on the patents which means that there will no longer be a third phase to the trial as there are no damages to be awarded and phase 1 ended in a partial verdict in favour of Oracle however the jury could not decide if Google had made “fair use” of the copyrights it had been found to infringe.
The good news for Google is that they will now definitely not have to rewrite its Android operating system which powers some 300 million smartphones worldwide in order to avoid the alleged infringements nor will they have to acquire some kind of licensing agreement.