Judge strikes part of Oracle's Java lawsuit against Google

A federal judge threw out a small part of Oracle's Java lawsuit against Google on Thursday but allowed the bulk of the case to proceed.

Oracle sued Google last year, arguing that Google had violated its Java intellectual property by writing its own version of the Java virtual machine, called Dalvik.

Google had asked that the case be thrown out of court, based on a number of arguments. In Thursday's ruling, the judge rejected the bulk of Google's arguments but did agree to throw out one of Oracle's claims in the case. U.S. District Judge William Alsup agreed with Google that the company had not violated Oracle's copyright by using Java method, class, API and package names that Oracle said were copyright-protected.