By Brent Kendall 

Last year the Supreme Court pared back patent protections for software. Now Google Inc. and other companies want the court to limit how software makers can use copyrights to assert exclusive rights over programs.

Google is asking the high court to intervene in a copyright-infringement case brought by Oracle Corp. over copyrights for the popular Java programming platform that software developers use to create applications for computers and other devices.

The Supreme Court on Monday invited the Obama administration to submit its views on whether the justices should hear Google's appeal. The case presents the court with a chance to consider the extent to which software innovations can be copied without permission from the original developer.

Oracle acquired Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010 and sued Google the same year, alleging that Google's widely used Android operating system for smartphones infringed copyrights on the Java platform. It has sought more than $1 billion in damages.

The battle has divided tech companies, and Google and Oracle each allege the other's position would deal a substantial blow to innovation. A trial judge barred Oracle from pressing certain copyright claims against Google, then an appeals court last year reversed that ruling and sided with Oracle.

Google said in court papers that if last year's ruling for Oracle had been the law of the land at the inception of the Internet age, "early computer companies could have blocked vast amounts of technological development by claiming 95-year copyright monopolies over the basic building blocks of computer design and programming."

The company declined to comment beyond its court briefs.

Oracle argues that Google's bid to limit copyrights would gut legal protections that have been central to growth in the software industry. "Google has not come up with any explanation for why Oracle's code loses copyright protection but all other code still retains protection," said Joshua Rosenkranz, a lawyer with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represents Oracle.

Several third parties, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Red Hat Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are urging the Supreme Court to take up Google's appeal. They say that if copyright is so broad as to cover the basic interfaces of software products, then it will be more difficult to make programs and products compatible with one another.

Other companies such as Microsoft Corp. sided with Oracle when the case was at a Washington-based federal appeals court, saying it would be destabilizing to limit the elements of software that are copyrightable.

Oracle's supporters say there are other legal doctrines, like the concept of fair use, that allow follow-on innovators to copy in some circumstances.

The fair-use issue looms over the Google case. A hung jury couldn't reach a conclusion on whether Google's alleged copying was fair. That question could be retried if the high court declines to take the case.

The case centers on Oracle's allegations Google unlawfully copied from 37 packages of pre-written Java programs, known as application programming interfaces, that serve as shortcuts for building common computer functions into other software programs.

Oracle says Google should have paid for a license or written all of its own code without using the shortcuts that Oracle spent years and millions of dollars developing.

It likened Google's actions to "plagiarizing the topic sentence of every paragraph of a blockbuster novel, as well as the chapter and subchapter titles, and then paraphrasing the rest."

Google says it replicated only small bits of code necessary to make certain shorthand programming commands work. It doesn't dispute that computer code can be original, creative and entitled to copyright protection.

But Google argues Oracle shouldn't be able to claim copyright on basic computer commands in software. Doing so would be like a typewriter maker claiming infringement against computer makers for copying the well-known QWERTY keyboard layout, it says.

If the Supreme Court takes the case, it could set rules for software copyrights beyond those it announced last June that limited some software patents. In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, the court ruled software makers couldn't take well-known concepts or methods, such as hedging risk in financial transactions, place them into a computer program and claim a patent. The decision already is being used to knock out weak software patents.

Patents are designed to protect inventions, and generally last for 20 years. Copyright protects authorship of original works, from books and music to software and architecture. For works of corporate authorship, the protection generally lasts 95 years.

Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com

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