The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Google this week in a major copyright case involving software company Oracle. The two American technology companies were in a dispute over several thousand lines of computer code written by Oracle. The company said that Google had violated U.S. copyright law by copying the computer commands within one of its software products. Google added the Oracle code to its own while developing the Android operating system. The code was used to create an application software interface, or API, for Android. APIs are the pieces of code that permit programs and apps to work together. Software developers have created millions of apps for Android. The operating system now powers more than 70 percent of the world's mobile devices. The Android system was released in 2007. To build it, Google wrote millions of lines of new computer code. But it also used about 11,500 lines of code copyrighted as part of Oracle's Java programming language. Oracle brought legal action against Google for violating its copyright and sought billions of dollars in payment. In a 6 to 2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling that Google’s use of Oracle’s code in Android was a copyright violation. Instead, the court ruled that Google’s copying was lawfully permitted as “fair use.”