SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle's copyright lawsuit is all about one "very simple rule," the company's attorney told a jury today.

"You don’t take people’s property without permission and use it for your own benefit," said Oracle lawyer Peter Bicks. "Google took a shortcut, and they took a shortcut at Oracle’s expense."

The closing argument Bicks delivered today was his final chance to convince a jury that Google should be held liable for copyright infringement for using 37 Java APIs, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. An appeals court has ruled that the APIs can be copyrighted. Now, Google's only hope of avoiding a payment to Oracle—which could potentially be in the billions of dollars—is a finding that it was "fair use" to harness the Java APIs.

"What I’m going to show you is a mountain of evidence that shows they haven’t come anywhere near meeting their burden of proof," Bicks said. For 90 minutes, Bicks ran through that evidence, arguing that every "fair use" factor weighed in Oracle's favor.

"They copied 11,500 lines of code," Bicks said. "It's undisputed. They took the code, they copied it, and put it right into Android."

And Java SE was used in smartphones, Bicks said, contrary to Google's argument. He pointed to a slide showing early Blackberry phones and early smartphone examples like Danger and SavaJe.

"When you look inside, under the hood, some of the same software in these phones is what’s used on Android," Bicks said.

Google's closing statement, presented to jurors earlier this morning, emphasized that key witnesses all agreed that Sun Microsystems had no problem with Google's use of the APIs. Bicks tried to subvert that testimony by pointing to Google e-mails.

The first arrow out of Bicks' quiver: trial exhibit 10 (PDF), a 2010 e-mail from engineer Tim Lindholm to Android chief Andy Rubin.

"We've been over a bunch of these [alternatives to Java] and think they all suck," said Bicks, reading Lindholm's words. "We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java."

"This document disproves everything stated over the last hour," Bicks concluded. "Everyone thought what they were doing was OK and that they didn't need a license. That the APIs were 'open and free;' that's not what the documents say."

He ran through more e-mails: Rubin talking about time pressure, as "the clocking was ticking," and Google might "miss the mobile window." An e-mail from ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz complained that Google saw itself as "immune to copyright laws."

"That's what this case is about," said Bicks. "A company that believes it's immune from the copyright laws. Oracle is a fierce competitor, but when you compete, you need to play by the rules. In this case, Google took shortcuts."

Competing against themselves

Bicks ran through "real examples" of fair use, showing them on a screen before crossing each one out: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

"Android fits none of these examples," he said. "This is the height of commerciality," he said, pointing to $42 billion in gross revenue that Android accrued between 2008 and 2015. He pointed to the earnings call in which CEO Larry Page boasted of 700,000 phones being "lit up" every day.

"Each and every one of those innovations has Oracle's intellectual property in it," said Bicks. "This is tied directly to ad revenue—clicks that generate money."

Then it was back to e-mails, like the one in which Rubin said that "java.lang APIs are copyrighted" and another Google e-mail saying they could "do Java anyway" and "perhaps make enemies along the way."

"Is this what an innovative company does?" Bicks asked. "They all knew in Google about Sun's view that this was copyrighted. It's not just one e-mail, not just two. They made a decision to copy, knowing full well about the copyrights. It's not right. It's not fair."

Bicks revisited the testimony of Oracle VP Mark Reinhold, and the lawyer compared use of the APIs to using "book titles, chapters, and topic sentences" of a series like Harry Potter. Google's favored word, "labels," was downright insulting, he suggested.

"'Labels' are what people use when they're in a courtroom to minimize the creativity, the hard work, of the people who did this," he said. "Google copied the heart of that platform. If you take that out, none of those millions of lines of code would work. If this wasn't important, why did Google copy it?"

"You don't check your common sense when you enter a courtroom," Bicks continued. "That's why juries like you are so great, because you bring common sense."

Next, the attorney reached toward the fourth factor of fair use, saying that Oracle suffered serious harm as their Java-licensing business cratered. Previously, Oracle CEO Safra Catz had told the jury "the whole Java community has been forked." Further Reading Oracle CEO Safra Catz: “We did not buy Sun to file this lawsuit”

"They were competing against themselves in the marketplace," Bicks said. "Imagine, somebody takes your property and is then competing against you—for free."

Even if Oracle stumbled when building a phone, that was beside the point, according to Bicks. "Sun failed, Oracle failed—so therefore, we can take it," he said. He launched into a real estate example: "Maybe you have some land and build a barn on it, and it doesn't stand up that well. Somebody doesn’t get to come onto your property, and say, 'You weren't good at building a barn, so I’m going to build a barn here.' The evidence isn't that Oracle failed. Android took over the market."

Bicks finished his closing statement just after 11:00am. The jury is set to soon deliberate.

"We'll have 25 minutes of rebuttal, and then the case will be in your hands," US District Judge Alsup told the jury before dismissing them for a break.

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