High Court Will Hear Google/Oracle Copyright Dispute

of action at the Supreme Court. The Justices have decided to give Google a hearing in its multibillion dollar clash with Oracle, and President Trump is asking the court to block subpoenas for his financial records and reverse the decisions of federal appellate courts in d C. And New York, something that the chief Judge of the Second Circuit, Robert Katzman, predicted this case seems bound for the Supreme Court. Joining

me is Greg Store. Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter Greg tell us about the two cases that President Trump wants the Justices to take. Two cases very different legal issues, but the same sort of feel to them. In one, New York District Attorney Cyrus Advance Jr. Is trying to get copies of Trump's tax returns for a grand jury investigation.

That request is currently on hold. The lower court said he's entitled to get those requests, though is on hold while Trump asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal. The other case involves the House of Representatives and a committee, not the committee that's that's looking into impeaching President Trump, a committee that wants Trump's financial records as part of what it says is a potential legislative change to the federal ethics laws. Again, a federal appeals court has said

the House is entitled to those documents. Trump is trying to get the Supreme Court to block that request, so Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the subpoena. Why explain that whole process that's in the House case. Had he not done that as it was set up, there was going to be a point where the House could have demanded that President Trump's accounting for a Mazurs turn over

those documents. This just basically kept everything in place while the Court decides whether to issue a longer delay and then ultimately decide whether to take up the president's appeal. And here arguments so greg to other presidents have tried and failed to get out of legal processes at the Supreme Court. So what are the chances the justices will take this case? Probably pretty good ageven that there are two cases. You know, it might be possible to duck

one of them. It's harder to duck two of them. It is the President of the United States asking for it. It may be that a majority of the justices on the court see his arguments as as a bit of a reach, because, particularly in the New York case, the president's private lawyer argued that the president has basically absolute immunity from any criminal investigations while he's in office. But it is the president he is saying, it is making

it harder for me to do my job. Now, it would be quite something for the Supreme Court to say, no, we don't even want to hear that argument. We're not even going to entertain that. Let's turn to a case that the justices will be considering. That's the Google Oracle case. Tell us about that. Yeah, this is a case that

is potentially worth billions of dollars. A federal appeals court lower court found that Google infringed Oracles copyrights on UH the so called application program interfaces, which are basically software code that allows one device to talk to another device, or or one program to talk to another program. Oracle sued Google for violating its copyrights and says we're owed

something like nine billion with a B dollars. Google says, first of all, you can't copyright this sort of stuff, and second of all, even if you can, there's this doctrine called fair use that would let us use these application program interfaces and that should seld us from from liability. The Court didn't have to take this case. In fact, the Justice Department suggested the Court not take the case, but but they did, and it's gonna be a titanic

fight within the tech industry. As you just described it, it's a very complicated case as far as the software, the interface, and the decision here was made by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court reversed the jury finding. That is a specialized court that handles these matters. So now we're gonna have a Supreme Court come in and handle this very technical kind of case,

which the expert court in these matters reversed. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting, of course, a Supreme Court that has a number of justices who aren't real tech savvy. But we've seen this before. This is UH with the Federal Circuit is also the court the handled patent cases. The Supreme Court has not been shy and re some years about jumping in and and saying mostly you're being too protective of patent rights. Federal Circuit UH, diving into the

technology and dealing with it as best they can. You know, the Supreme Court does think that that it is the one that needs to decide these especially important matters, even if if it means diving into a subject area that they don't have a whole lot of expertise. And I don't envy you being at the oral arguments in this case, because I remember some oral arguments in the past with issues involving technical matters, and I didn't mean to disparase

Supreme Court justice is. In addition, Supreme Court reporters, including me, aren't necessarily that tech savvy, So it will be a challenge for all of us to try to understand what's really an issue in in this case and try to figure out how copyright law, which of course was written originally set up not thinking about application program interfaces but thinking more about more conventional words and the like be interesting to see how the court manages to apply the

Copyright Act to to this area of computers. What kind of ramifications will this decision have on the tech industry? And they could be pretty significant, even putting aside we're talking about billions of dollars in this case alone, but beyond that, Google's argument is, look, these software code, software interfaces like this have always been freely available. That's that's Google's argument, and without it, innovation is going to suffer

because if we can't get access to these things. Uh, they say, we can't build new products that use them. And UH. Oracle makes obviously a different argument where it says, look, we put a lot of money, a lot of work into these things, and we actually would have let Google use our our code. We just wanted them to agree to a license and we wanted them, among other things, to agree that whatever they did with it, it would be compatible with the Java programming language. That is what

this is all about. And so if the case that has divided Silicon Valley to different ways of looking at rights to computer code, and it will be uh, probably extremely important for the tech industry going forward. And finally, I want to ask you about the health of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who missed some moral arguments. Until this this year, she had never missed a Supreme Court argument

because she was ill. Back in January, she missed a number of days because she was recovering from a cancer treatment of surgery, and she missed a day in this most recent sitting, just one day to arguments where she we were told had the stomach bug. But she was back on the bench of the following week and looked like the same Ruth Bader Ginsburg that we've been used to sing. Thanks Gregg, that's Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter Greg Store. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast.

You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brasso. This is Bloomberg, the dedded Duck of the