If Oracle wins, Google and its parent company Alphabet could be facing anywhere up to $9.3 billion in damages. Although many doubt they’d end up paying that in full, the complications would still be costly—and to more than just Google.

Though the landscape has changed some since the initial 2012 showdown, the root of it all remains the same: Java. Google engineers used the basic elements to build the Android mobile operating system, without taking a license from Oracle (or Sun Microsystems, Oracle’s predecessor, which developed Java). Specifically, the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which is the set of instructions for different softwares to communicate to each other. Though the Java language is free to use, Oracle sued Google in 2010, stating that because 37 Java APIs were used in Android Google had infringed on Oracle’s rights.

And perhaps looking at copyright straight on, it appears they have. That’s what the appeals court in California sat down to start figuring out yesterday (the beginning of jury selection), weighing Oracle’s complaints of infringement against Google’s fair use defense. For the search-engine giant, Google will tell the jury that its use of APIs was transformative under the first part of the four-question fair use test courts use. And many in the computer science industry argue they’re right. Not just because they agree, but because the industry is built on it.

The truth is that while Google may be one of the biggest, it’s not the only one using unlicensed APIs. If they lose, they wouldn’t be the only one tasked with paying out licenses for every interaction or reinventing the wheel—which as Slate writes is something of an accurate description of the alternative:

Oracle, the appeals court, and the Department of Justice think that owning a copyright on a language isn’t a big deal, because others can always invent new words rather than copying. According to the appeals court, for example, “the Sun/Oracle developers had a vast range of options,” so “designing the Java API packages was a creative process” that could be protected by copyright. The existence of “alternative” languages, said the appeals court, makes it reasonable for Oracle to own one of them.

The problem is that there are “alternatives,” and then there are actual alternatives. Certainly you could invent an alternative Java API language, or an alternative Klingon language, or an alternative Wi-Fi protocol. All of these would be perfectly valid languages—and they would be totally useless for their intended purposes. Speaking alt-Klingon on Kronos gets you killed or, worse, condemned to the dilithium mines of Rura Penthe. Speaking alt–Java API or alt–Wi-Fi has equally futile (albeit less deadly, one hopes) consequences: Your laptop can’t get on the Internet, your computer program doesn’t run.

Photo Credit: louisa_catlover cc
Photo Credit: louisa_catlover cc

To some extent this is all playing into Google’s strategy: Oracle, a “rival” in some sense of the modern renaissance tech company, is doing through litigation what it can’t do with innovation. Google is the little guy, standing up where it can for the tech community and software developers around the world, against Oracle’s greed.

But in another sense, the modern software development game is heavily democratized. So much of the contemporary technology company has been shaped by the sort of egalitarian, neo-American dream; you can use these basic fundamentals of code to change the world, building off of code work that came before you to go beyond what was while also making it easily translatable to technology already in place. By denying APIs, the court would effectively be declaring that some of the fundamental building blocks that connect softwares are owned, creating an open season on any companies using these APIs or similar connection codes.

“That is really going to create a radical shift in how software is developed worldwide,” Mitch Stoltz, an attorney with the EFF said in an interview with Ars Technica. “If it requires permission each time APIs are used and code calls other code, then you’ve upended the economics of software.”

And at this point, no one’s sure which way the court will go. The last time Google was here they got a clean sweep, but with the new instructions from the Federal Circuit which emphatically overturned the lower court’s ruling and a jury, where emotions are often as good indicators of right as facts are, the tech company’s fate is less certain. Oracle bet big with their argument that a developer could be subject to a copyright suit over calling an API, and they won. If Google can’t win on fair use, Silicon Valley’s big idea that code should be re-usable may be the biggest loser.