The long-running spat between Oracle and Google — two old hooligans, if you will — reached a milestone ruling these past couple of days. Google was hauled into court over accusations that it copied 37 of Oracle's APIs and 11 lines of Java source code for Android. (Oracle's lawyers argue,) that's some serious copying.

The news comes from Re/code, and someone on NetEase has already translated it. The gist is simple: the court ruled that Google was guilty of copying Oracle's APIs and those 11 lines of Java source code. Oracle cheered — justice has been served, splendid work, Your Honor — while Google responded with something along the lines of "you've got to be kidding me." The full verdict can be found here

I just had a quick conversation with one of Oracle's lawyers, E. Joshua Rosenkranz of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a New York law firm. "Java software code took years and many millions of dollars to develop," he said. "And the Federal Circuit understood that no one in their right mind would ever make an investment like that if anyone could just steal the work and use it to compete against the original developer." --Re/code

Heh.

Back in 2010, Sun Microsystems — by which time Java was fully mature — was acquired by Oracle, Solaris and all. Oracle then went about wringing every possible licensing fee out of Java while acting all innocent and wronged. Given all that, anyone still reckless enough to mess with Java freely kind of had it coming.