Quick recap: The Google-Oracle trial began on Monday.  Oracle sued Google for allegedly infringing Java patents for the Android platform.  The first day of trial was spent on jury selection and Oracle’s opening statements.  The second day, Google gave their opening remarks and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took the stand, claiming Google knew they were infringing Java patents.

Google CEO Larry Page appeared in court on the second and third day of trial.  His testimony did not provide much information as he consistently stated that he couldn’t remember the details regarding the questions Oracle lawyers were asking.  Page may be called again in court before the end of the trial.

Day 4

Oracle presented Google internal e-mails in court as evidence that Google knew they were infringing Java patents.  The e-mails presented included Google engineer Tim Lindholm’s e-mail to Andy Rubin, which stated that he had been asked by top Google execs to look into alternatives for Java to which Lindholm stated that all other alternatives sucked and they needed to work on licensing Java patents.

Lindholm took the stand on the fourth day of trial and was questioned by Oracle lawyer David Boies about the said e-mail.  The Google engineer confirmed that it was indeed an e-mail he penned but stated that he wasn’t pertaining to acquiring license from Sun Microsystems.

“It was not specifically a license from anybody,” Lindholm said.

Lindholm was also questioned by Google attorney Christa Anderson about the copyright issues filed against them.  He stated that he understood the software over which Oracle is claiming copyright to be free for use by other people.

A witness from Oracle also took the stand, Oracle Java Platform Group chief architect Mark Reinhold, who worked 14 years at Sun as principal engineer for Java SE & OpenJDK before Oracle acquired Sun.

Reinhold turned the courtroom into a classroom as he gave a tutorial of how Java works as part of his testimony.  His testimony focused on the 37 APIs and provided definitions of Java programming language, Java APIs and class libraries, but also got into the technical weeds with documentation extractors, compilers and comments that begin with a slash and two stars.

Reinhold was examined by Oracle lawyer Michael Jacobs where he explained that “the 37 APIs that Oracle claims Google infringed upon are not required by the Java language, but there are a few APIs tightly related to the Java language that are necessary for Java development.”  Reinhold also stated that “each page of the language specification includes a copyright notice,” even though Google insists that APIs aren’t copyrightable.

Google lawyer Dan Purcell cross-examined Reinhold and asked about the authorship and the variety of Java APIs.  Purcell also established that “10-20% of Java API packages were written by members of the Java Community Process, not Sun or Oracle. Ten of the 37 APIs in question were created with other members of the Java Community Process who were not paid for their work by Sun or Oracle.”

Purcell continued to pepper Reinhold with questions, one of which was regarding accessing source code in libraries in programming speak, to which Reinhold replied: “I’m sorry, the question is malformed.”  When asked what he meant by that, Reinhold explained that, “there is no source code in libraries…libraries are in object form, in zeros and ones.”

The next witness was Joshua Bloch, a former distinguished engineer at Sun and a Java guru who joined Google in 2004.  Bloch was questioned by Google and Oracle lawyers regarding the “range check” code – 9 lines of code – which he wrote while he was still working at Sun.  He was asked by Oracle if it was used for the Android platform and he stated that he doesn’t recall if it was but admitted that Sun copyrighted their codes while he was still there.

During his testimony, Bloch stated that “an API is not a blueprint that tells you how or to build or implement something.”  He was then asked by Google representative Bruce Baber to explain naming conventions in Java APIs–packages, classes and methods, to which Judge William Alsup added that Bloch explain how packages, classes and method apply to Java APIs.  Bloch stated that, “the API would be like an address, the package the city, the class the street and the method, the house number.”

Bloch and Reinhold both mentioned that without APIs, Java has no purpose.