A federal jury’s unanimous ruling Wednesday that Google (GOOG) did not infringe Oracle’s (ORCL) patents when it developed its Android software was a major victory for the search giant and a blow to Oracle’s efforts to control how others use its Java software. But experts and analysts say it’s unclear how much of an impact the verdict will have on the tech industry as a whole.

Immediately after the verdict was announced, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the 10 jurors and canceled the third phase of the trial that was to determine damages. Alsup said he would issue a decision on a related copyright issue within the case next week.

Oracle was seeking $1 billion in damages, alleging that Android infringes Oracle’s copyrights and patents for Java programming tools. But Alsup suggested at the hearing that it could now receive no more than $150,000 in “statutory damages.”

“Oracle’s challenge to Android is much smaller now,” said Edward Naughton, a Boston attorney who specializes in tech intellectual property and has blogged about the case. “Oracle fired a lot of arrows at Google and today we learned that a bunch of them missed.”

There’s still one arrow left. It’s up to Alsup to unravel a mixed and confusing verdict from an earlier phase of the trial that centers on whether so called Application Programming Interfaces (API) are copyrightable. APIs essentially enable apps to talk to an operating system.

In a statement, Oracle said it had “presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java. We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java’s core write once run anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility.”

Google spokesman Jim Prosser called the verdict a huge win in the company’s campaign to defend the way it writes code for Android, which now runs on more than 300 million smartphones and has given Google a dominant perch alongside Apple (AAPL) in the booming mobile-devices market.

“Two years ago, we got this lawsuit from Oracle wanting over $6 billion in damages and accusing us of infringing seven patents,” said Prosser, pointing out that the jury had earlier found there was copyright infringement in two files in which Android copied nine lines of Java code. “So that’s only nine lines of code out of 15 million lines in Android. And they were lines that the judge, who’s a programmer himself, said any high-school kid could write in five minutes. So this sprawling case with lots of accusations comes down to very little in the end.”

Prosser said the verdict should send a loud message that American patent laws need a serious overhaul.

“We have so many very broad and vague patents out there that two people can look at one patent and see two completely different things it covers,” he said. “So you have all these patent lawsuits between tech companies and it’s very damaging to the industry overall. We think the patent system needs to work better for software.”

Oracle, the largest maker of database software, alleged Google stole two patents for the Java programming language when it developed Android. In the first phase of the trial, the same jury found the search engine company infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights while it couldn’t agree on whether the copying was “fair use.”

In the end, says analyst Al Hilwa with IDC, the court case constituted an epic battle between two tech behemoths over control of the programming language used to power millions of smartphones. Regardless of how the judge rules on the API question next week, Hilwa says this week’s verdict probably won’t change much beyond allowing Google to claim victory and pushing Oracle to rethink its legal strategy.

“Hopefully the judge will provide some clarity,” said Hilwa. “But what’s best for the industry would be if the two sides could just sit down and come up with good solution for the evolution of Java, perhaps by giving Android a bigger place in the Java eco-system. That could be the definition of a classic win-win, but unfortunately neither side wants to cede any control.”

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc