31 May 2012: A U.S. judge has ruled that the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) used in Android are not protected by copyright, marking a defeat for Oracle in its lawsuit against Google, ComputerWorld reports. The ruling is a narrow one, applying only to the 37 Java APIs that were at issue at trial. Oracle, the current owner of Java, sued Google for, among other things, using Java APIs in its Android OS. Oracle claimed that Google infringed both its patents and copyrights. The Court disagreed, and Judge Alsup ruled that “Google and the public were and remain free to write their own implementations to carry out exactly the same functions of all methods in question.”