A US judge said Oracle can't seek USD 1 billion in damages from Google for infringing copyrights when it developed Android software because a jury couldn't agree on whether it was "fair use". The jury in San Francisco found that Google infringed Oracle's copyrights for programming tools and nine lines of code. US District Judge William Alsup said at this point Oracle can only seek damages on the nine lines, which by law would be at most USD 150,000, Bloomberg reports. Oracle alleged that Google stole copyrights and patents for the Java programming language when it developed Android. Oracle acquired Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. Oracle is seeking damages as well as a court order preventing Google from distributing Android unless it pays for a licence. While Java is a free language, Oracle argued that the parts of Java that Google used are covered by copyrights and that the search engine company was required to pay for a licence to use the technology. Google claims that any bits of copied Java in Android constituted fair use because Google gives Android away free to programmers and it expanded the language's usefulness by finding a way to build a smartphone operating system with Java, something Sun and Oracle were unable to do. The next phase of the case is about two Java patents Oracle alleges were infringed. The judge ordered the patent phase of the case to begin 08 May; damages will be taken up by the jury in the last phase of the eight-week trial.
