Microsoft to back Oracle in Java case against Google -- report

The legal war between Oracle and Google has been rather muted for the last several months, but there could be a major new twist in the case.

Reuters has reported that legal representatives for Microsoft told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a briefing yesterday that it would support Oracle.

We reached out to Oracle to confirm, but the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based corporation declined to comment.

Not many more details are available at this time, but it would seemingly line up with Microsoft's other patent-related lawsuits against Motorola Mobility, now a Google subsidiary.

To recall, Oracle originally sued Google in 2010 over copyright infringement related to the use of 37 Java APIs used on the Android mobile operating system.

Google argued they were free to use because the Java programming language is free to use, and the APIs are required to use the language. Oracle tried to make the case that Google had knowingly used the APIs without a license from Sun Microsystems, which was bought by Oracle in 2010.

But last spring, a federal jury at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco sided with Google on nearly all of the copyright claims as well as on all of the patent disputes.

At this point in the case, Oracle is working on an appeal after a federal judge rejected the Java owner's motion for a new trial. The two parties also met several times last summer to discuss damages.

In one instance, at a case management hearing in June, Oracle's legal team explained that it filed a stipulation in which Google was asked to pay $0 in statutory damages (in reference to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method and the test files) in order to move proceedings along faster as it works toward an appeal.

This story originally appeared at ZDNet under the headline "Microsoft teaming up with Oracle against Google in Java case?"