Sometimes Saying Nothing is Saying Something

The Supreme Court has denied a cert petition in the Oracle vs Google fight over Java. This is a victory for Oracle, as it won in the CAFC and that decision now stands. It is probably also a loss for everyone else and may well be a significant blow to Java as Oracle is now free to charge everyone for use of the (buggy, security-hole-ridden) language.

Google still has a fair use defense it can try but if there is not a team of engineers inside Google hard at work producing a Java-free version of Android I'll eat my hat. The decision to extend copyright protection to programming APIs is threatening to nearly everything that modern programming is about. Even Microsoft and Apple at their most monopolistic never tried to claim that they should be paid by people who wanted to interoperate with them.

All that said, I wouldn't read too much into this event. The denial of certatori happens a lot - some years well over 80% of petitions are denied - and there's rarely any explanation given. Court watchers love to speculate about these things - my personal theory is that SCOTUS didn't see a compelling reason to enlarge its ongoing fight with the CAFC - but all you can say for sure is that Google and its amici failed to make a case compelling enough that four justices agreed that it should go on the Court's docket. Who knows what they'll say the next time around.