Google v. Oracle (Supreme Court 2020)
The Supreme Court has rescheduled oral arguments in this big Copyright case until Fall 2020. I have mentioned previously that this case was likely to be the biggest patent case of 2020 — even though no patent questions were raised in the petition. The basic question is when software is copyrightable — the focus here is particularly at the interface-level (the the naming-convention for Java function calls). In the case, Google also suggests that if the naming-convention is copyrightable that any copyright should be so “thin” that fair use would readily apply in most situations.
Case will now be argued in October or November 2020 with a decision likely in 2021.
Why would this be an important patent case at all, much less the biggest case in 2020, considering that there are no patents or patent issues whatsoever involved?
Is it just because the two really bad appeals court decisions were made by the CAFC, as a result of patent questions that had been at issue in unrelated aspects of the Google-Oracle trial? This is a chance for the Supremes to continue their pattern and reject the CAFC’s judgement, but it’s still not a patent case.
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