Larry Ellison bought Sun in the hopes of winning intellectual property riches from its Java programming language. Those hopes have now been smashed. After having Oracle’s Java patent claims against Google Android all but completely smashed, and a mere nine lines of code found to actually have been copied into Android from Java, Oracle’s last hope was that U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup would rule that Java’s application programming interfaces (API)s could be copyrighted. Instead Alsup has smashed Oracle’s API claims as if they were cockroaches.

Oracle had sued Google over copyright infringement related to the use of 37 Java APIs used on the Android mobile operating system. Google argued they were free to use because Java both cause it was open source , and that, in case, APIs can’t be copyrighted and that they’re required to use any language.

Judge crushes Oracle’s API copyright claims like a bug. More >