Supreme Court rules in Google's favor in dispute with Oracle

Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers, Dan Howley and Brian Cheung discuss the latest Google dispute.

Video Transcript

BRIAN CHEUNG: I wanted to switch topics to Google and Oracle. It seems like the Supreme Court with their ruling over a copyright dispute that those two tech companies had. Give us an update on that.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, Oracle was trying to sue Google for as much as $9 billion, basically saying that it stole portions of Oracle's Java code when it built Android. Now, Google had lost twice at the appellate level in this ongoing battle, more than a decade. But at the Supreme Court level, Google ended up winning. According to the Supreme Court, Google's use of the Java code was considered fair use.

So basically, they were allowed to use that in the implementation of Android. And essentially, it was foundational or a piece of code that really helped things kind of move. It wasn't necessarily able to be copywritten or copyrighted by the company itself, and it was under fair use. So Google is winning here. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it's a huge win. And it could reverberate across Silicon Valley, as well as other industries, for years to come.