I'm unfamiliar with the legal system (judicial system?).
I had thought that the jury's findings were final.
Am I understanding correctly that the case still went to the Supreme Court of the US, and now that court finds in favor of Google.
What happens after this, more appeals or is this like a proper static const readonly final?
In the US, the Supreme Court is the static const readonly final. It's over. There is literally no route of appeal or any way Oracle can keep this case going without a whole new lawsuit. The Supreme Court can elect to make a ruling and then send it back to a smaller court _if they choose_ for final assessment, but they did not do that here, making this ruling definitive.
Oracle (or some other company) can bring another case. It has to be different enough that it isn't immediately struck down based on precedent, but similar enough that a ruling would require appealing to the Supreme Court and force them to overturn or invalidate the Oracle v Google precedent. The chance of this happening is negligible, but this is basically the conservative plan for getting the Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v Wade precedent.
Sometimes SCOTUS explicitly suggests in an opinion that it's time to overrule precedent but they don't want to do so in that case.
Most recently (that I'm aware of) is South Dakota v Wayfair. SCOTUS previously held that states couldn't impose sales tax on out-of-state companies. Subsequently, many states imposed "use taxes" which are essentially sales taxes paid by consumers on purchases they didn't pay sales tax already to get around this. Colorado passed a law which required out-of-state companies to essentially provide sales tax computation information to Colorado (but not sales tax itself), and Kennedy noted in his concurrence that maybe it was time to revisit the sales tax precedent. So South Dakota went ahead and passed a sales tax on out-of-state companies in direct violation of previous precedent, and SCOTUS promptly overturned that precedent when it heard the case.
Well, more precisely: they definitively ruled that (a) a judge can decide whether a use is fair use and (b that this is fair use. Then they remanded the case to lower courts to decide what that means in terms of what happens next in this case.
You understand correctly. The jury's decision isn't final (and I thought this was ruled on by a judge directly, instead of a jury, but I could be wrong). You can appeal pretty much any case to a higher court. I don't know the order, but it's not uncommon for cases to appeal to a higher court several times. I.e. a verdict is rendered in a county court; you don't like it, so you appeal to the state court. State court still doesn't give the decision you want, so you appeal to the Supreme Court.
It's worth noting that the higher court can reject your appeal. You're not entitled to be seen by the higher court, and if you can't come up with good grounds for why the lower court was wrong, the appeal will be rejected. The Supreme Court rejects a fair number of appeals (I think the majority of cases).
This is final though. There is no higher court than the Supreme Court to appeal to. At this point, the only reason it would change is if the laws change, or the Supreme Court reverses their decision later. It's extremely rare that they whole-hog reverse a precedent that they set, though.
> The jury's decision isn't final (and I thought this was ruled on by a judge directly, instead of a jury, but I could be wrong).
The idealized rule is that the jury is the final arbitrator of matters of fact, while judges (and appeal courts) decide matters of law. Ideals don't match reality cleanly, especially on matters like fair use which is "mixed fact and law." But additionally, you can sometimes appeal matters of fact by arguing that no reasonable jury could have reached the facts as it did (these are very rare, as I understand it, except in situations where mixed fact/law comes into play).
Some other points you're missing. First, you have to appeal on particular failures of law; you can't just appeal that you don't like the decision. In particular, if you try to appeal past the appeal court to a higher court, you can only make arguments that you made to the appeal court.
Another important thing is that appeal courts can push the case back down to the lower court to redecide based on clarifying law. That's what happened here, essentially. Google won on the trial, Oracle appealed saying that the judge incorrectly ruled that the API wasn't copyrightable (and the appeal court agreed with Oracle), which told the lower court to try it again with the correct ruling on API copyrightable. Google tried to appeal SCOTUS, who refused to hear it. Lower court had another jury trial, which found Google had fair use. Oracle appealed again to appeals court, which found that the jury couldn't have thought it fair use. Google appealed to SCOTUS, which just now disagreed with the appeal court.
This does not match my understanding of the situation (though note: I am not a lawyer; take everything that follows with a grain of salt).
My understanding is that a jury's primary task of deciding on the facts is final. The facts in a case like this seem to me to be things like deciding whether Oracle in fact holds the copyright, and whether Google's copy of the API is sufficiently similar for that copyright to apply to Google's copy.
Now as far as appeals go, you can appeal whether the trial was done properly, such that the jury was able to do its fact-finding job correctly. You can appeal what was then decided based on those facts (e.g. sentencing). You can appeal meta-questions, like whether a particular decision is a "finding of fact" or not to start with.
The question of whether "fair use" is the sort of thing that is decided by judge or jury is apparently somewhat contentious in this case; I just found https://www.law.uw.edu/wlr/print-edition/print-edition/vol-9... describing some of the issues there. Today's decision refers to this as well: it's (c) under "Held":
> (c) The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This ap- proach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense. Pp. 18–21.
which sure sounds like the Supreme Court effectively decided that the final determination of whether a use is "fair use" or not should be made by a judge, not a jury. Then they proceed to make that determination in this case in holding (d).
I didn't understand that either, but I found a good explanation on page 2:
"The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Reviewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of underlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense."
A jury's findings are final only in determining the facts of the case. The actual legal implications of those facts can still be appealed, reviewed, and modified.
I think the question about overturning the jury is directly addressed in the linked PDF, whose Syllabus is surprisingly easy to read:
> Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know exactly what this means, other than the SCOTUS saying that it can override the jury decision.
The latter. Once the Supreme Court rules, that is the law of the land, unless Congress/President pass a new law substantially changing things, which could then have challenges go back through the judicial process.
As others has said elsewhere, the jury rules on facts and judges rules on law. SCOTUS are judges. Under one interpretation of law, the most recent jury findings of fact held that Google infringed.
SCOTUS altered the interpretation of the law, thus removing the legal justification for why the jury found infringement. Since they did not alter any findings of fact (they did not need to) this ruling is legally fine.
A jury can say you definitely did X, that court's judge can say X is illegal, and SCOTUS can then declare X is legal so it doesn't matter anymore if you did X.
Generally, the Supreme Court finds narrowly on a specific point of friction in the case of a lesser court, answers the question, and kicks it back to that court, as a final answer for that very specific thing.
The point in this case was, can Oracle overturn the "phone books cannot be Copyrighted" concept baked into tech law by the IBM v Compaq BIOS case. Seems the Supreme Court finally told Oracle the collection of method signatures from the Java base API are, indeed, a phone book.
You are just totally wrong, the majority did not issue a ruling on copyrightability. It just said that even if the API is copyrightable Google's actions were "fair use," which is a legal doctrine allowing some use of copyrighted works without a license.
They could file a new lawsuit but this specific complaint is effectively over.
Considering that the votes were not close, I don’t think Oracle would try again. Likely they will pursue a substantially different strategy to try and extort Google.
Realistically, both Google and Oracle are 800lb gorillas and the battle will continue via lobbying legistlators, if not court appeals. It's very hard to believe Oracle would just keel over and give up.
Congress can't make retroactive laws, this case is basically done and Google won't have to pay for their use of Java that occured/occurs prior to the passing of a new law. Oracle doesn't have a vested interest in ruining copyright for everyone in the future if they can't get past damages out of it. That would hurt themselves as much as it would hurt everyone else.
I'm pretty confident that Oracle rolls over on this issue permanently.
What happens after this, more appeals or is this like a proper static const readonly final?