In its never-ending effort to prove that Google illegally copied its software code in building the Android mobile operating system, Oracle compares its tech rival to someone shameless enough to plagiarize the structure of a Harry Potter novel.
On Wednesday, Oracle filed a brief with a federal court as part of its appeal of a high-profile court case that ended with an all but complete victory for Google, and the brief begins with comparison to a Harry Potter plagiarist. Oracle even goes so far as to tag this imaginary plagiarist with the cheekiest of names: Ann Droid.
"Ann Droid wants to publish a bestseller. So she sits down with an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the fifth book – and proceeds to transcribe. She verbatim copies all the chapter titles—from Chapter 1 ('Dudley Demented') to Chapter 38 ('The Second War Begins'). She copies verbatim the topic sentences of each paragraph, starting from the first (highly descriptive) one and continuing, in order, to the last, simple one ('Harry nodded.'). She then paraphrases the rest of each paragraph. She rushes the competing version to press before the original under the title: Ann Droid’s Harry Potter 5.0," the brief reads.
"Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid—and has offered the same defenses."
This is only what we've come to expect from Oracle. The company is determined to prove that Google violated its copyright in cloning the Java APIs, or application programming interfaces – the software the developers use to build applications atop the Java Platform.
But as Judge William Alsup ruled in largely ruling against Oracle when the case went to trial, an API is not a work of art. In a previous decision, Judge Alsup argued that an API was more like a library system for organizing books than a book itself and, as such, was not subject to copyright. That's one of the decisions Oracle is now appealing.
Ed Walsh, an intellectual property attorney with the Boston-based law firm Wolf Greenfield, says that Oracle's strategy is sound – if, like Oracle, you think this case is worth fighting. "Perhaps naming the author Ann Droid was a bit much, but I think the legal strategy is right, if they want to win the case," he says.
Google and Oracle both declined to comment on this story.
Cade Metz contributed to this story.
