Google v. Oracle is the name of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the long-running Oracle v. Google copyright case. In 2010, Oracle sued Google for allegedly infringing Oracle’s copyright in Java Application Programming Interfaces (Java APIs). Google won twice in the trial court, but the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed both times. Google then successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case; in 2021, that Court ruled in favor of Google on its fair use defense.

An oddity of U.S. Supreme Court practice is that the Court captions its cases with the petitioner named first (here Google), versus the respondent (here Oracle). That’s what happened here even though Oracle sued Google, and although this case was known as Oracle v. Google for the first nine years of its life. You can read about the details of this case, including many of the filed documents, at our Oracle v. Google case page. We’ve created this short case page here in case anyone is looking for the case under its Supreme Court caption.