Google scored a major victory over Oracle this week as the United States Supreme Court ruled the search giant did not violate an Oracle patent over the use of the Java SE programming language to construct its Android operating system. More importantly, the ruling indicated that copyright law could be applied differently to software code.

In a 6-2 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed that Google’s use of around 11,500 lines of Java SE (Standard Edition) code as part of Android was a “fair use” of that code. It explained that the code and APIs used made up just 0.4% of the entire Java code base and was used to substantially create an entirely new ecosystem.

“Google’s copying of the Java SE API, which included only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair use of that material as a matter of law,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the ruling.

Oracle initially filed a legal challenge in 2010, which followed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems where the Java code was originally developed. Oracle had been seeking nearly $9 billion in compensation.

The company was obviously not pleased with the decision.

“The Google platform just got bigger and market power greater – the barriers to entry higher and the ability to compete lower,” Oracle EVP and General Counsel Dorian Daley noted in a statement. “They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can. This behavior is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices.”

Oracle’s angle is somewhat similar to that of some vendors that have been battling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the use of their open source software.

In a blog post on the news, Forrester Research senior analyst David Mooter and principal analyst Sandy Carielli explained that the decision and description could have a significant impact on how courts might view the use of open source code and APIs moving forward.

“It noted that computer code, unlike books and movies, has a functional purpose that creates a public interest unique from all other copyrightable media,” they wrote. “This allowed the court to define a fair use precedent for computer code that seems to be more lenient than other media.”

More metaphysically, they added that “the written decision compares Java’s APIs to the Dewey Decimal System and spoken language itself: a sort of organizational system that defines a potential world of ideas and lets the user navigate into an actual world of actual tasks. We think that sends a strong signal that APIs are ideas, not expressions of ideas, and thus not copyrightable.”

The decision could also relieve pressure from organizations that rely heavily on open source code to construct their own platforms. The Forrester Research analysts noted that this takes some of the pressure off of legal and compliance teams that “leverage the license risk features in software composition analysis (SCA) tools to identify noncompliant or high-risk licenses in open source packages.”

“Imagine if the court had ruled that Google had infringed on Oracle’s copyright,” they noted in the blog post. “Those ownership and liability questions would have become a lot muddier. Every organization would be rescanning their code to look for API declarations that would put them at similar risk — and the time spent analyzing code, discarding false positives, and making educated guesses on risk levels would have led to a lot of late nights in the development, compliance, and legal departments.”