For once, Google might not have been evil

If you're going to stick people's books up on the internet, word for word, page for page, the very least you should do is ask them if it's OK to do so.

Earlier this year, the multi-room audio company Sonos sued Google for patent infringement, complaining that Google forced Sonos to reveal all its technology secrets in order to get Sonos speakers to work with Google Assistant, and that Google then turned around and used all those secrets to produce speakers of its own.

Google has issued the usual "vigorous" denial and says it will fight the lawsuit, but regardless, the Sonos case is widely viewed as yet another example of Google's propensity to wield its huge market power, not to mention its huge legal team, to crush the little guy.

This time, it could be different

Whether the same can be said for one of the most crucial intellectual charges ever levelled against Alphabet/Google, one that is soon to be adjudicated by the US Supreme Court and which could determine the very future of computer software, is another matter, however.

For starters, the case has been brought by Oracle, itself something of a behemoth, and far from the most sympathetic Big Tech company in the world.

(It's not unheard of for people in the tech industry to joke that "Oracle" stands for "Obscenely Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison", referring to the $US60-plus billion ($90-billion) net worth of Oracle's founder, making him one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Whether Mr Ellison deserves to be called that particular A-word is not for this columnist to judge. I'll simply note that he is a licensed pilot, so "Obscenely Rich Aviator" may well be a better description.)

But, also, the case isn't just another glaring example of Google copying other people's work without permission, just because it wanted to. It might be that Google copied Oracle's intellectual property because it needed to.

And that's the crux of the case.

The complaint relates to 11,500 lines of code which Google admits it copied from an open-source version of the Java programming language when it built the Android operating system with the promise that Android would run apps written in Java.

Oracle claims those lines of code infringe on its right to Java, which it had acquired when it bought Java's inventor, Sun Microsystems, in 2010.

The complaint relates to 11,500 lines of code which Google admits it copied from an open-source version of the Java programming language.

If those 11,500 lines of code had been ordinary lines of code, the case would be a simple one. Google stole them.

But the 11,500 lines were what's known as Java's "interface", which as the name suggests is the part of the system that mediates the interaction between a third-party developer who use a language such as Java, and the system that runs the Java code.

Interfaces are the contract between the programmers who develop a feature or function, and the programmers who use that feature or function. They actually don't do anything, and they're as boring as batshit to write (which was part of Google's defence, as it happens), but without them software development as we know it would be next to impossible, and the world would grind to a halt.

Let's say you have publicly available data repository program which has an interface containing a function named "getCurrentUser()".

A third-party using your repository and calling the "getCurrentUser()" command knows that, if their program calls it correctly, it will be returned a "User" object that contains certain data that is formatted a certain way.

They don't care how the data repository got the user data. All they care is that, when they issue the command getCurrentUser(), their program receives properly formatted user data from the repository.

Meanwhile, you the author of the data repository software know that you are free to tweak it however you like, as long as you don't change the interface. (Or, if you must change the interface, you only do it with months or years of forewarning.)

You can get the user data from a local database, or from a database on the internet, or they could get it from the back of the refrigerator for that matter. As long as you fulfil your end of the bargain and return a properly formatted User object whenever someone issues the getCurrentUser() command, changes to your end of the system won't break the other end of the system.

Which is why people who might normally hate the way that Google operates (this columnist included) find themselves in Google's camp in this case. Microsoft, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and many, many others have all written to the US Supreme Court, pleading Google's case.

But just because everyone needs it to be so doesn't mean it is so.

The question facing the US Supreme Court isn't whether interfaces are crucial to the future of software, which they clearly are, but whether copyright law says that a company such as Oracle can own the rights to the interface to a system, as well as to the system itself, and whether copying the interfaces should be considered fair use.

Courts have flip-flopped on this question in the past. It's not a simple matter. Whether they flip or flop this time will be telling.