Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. I'm June Grosso. Every
Speaker 1: day we bring you insight and analysis into the most
Speaker 1: important legal news of the day. You can find more
Speaker 1: episodes at the Bloomberg Law Podcast, on Apple podcast, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. The Justices don't
Speaker 1: return to the bench until next month, but there's plenty
Speaker 1: of action at the Supreme Court. The Justices have decided
Speaker 1: to give Google a hearing in its multibillion dollar clash
Speaker 1: with Oracle, and President Trump is asking the court to
Speaker 1: block subpoenas for his financial records and reverse the decisions
Speaker 1: of federal appellate courts in d C. And New York,
Speaker 1: something that the chief Judge of the Second Circuit, Robert Katzman,
Speaker 1: predicted this case seems bound for the Supreme Court. Joining
Speaker 1: me is Greg Store. Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter Greg
Speaker 1: tell us about the two cases that President Trump wants
Speaker 1: the Justices to take. Two cases very different legal issues,
Speaker 1: but the same sort of feel to them. In one,
Speaker 1: New York District Attorney Cyrus Advance Jr. Is trying to
Speaker 1: get copies of Trump's tax returns for a grand jury investigation.
Speaker 1: That request is currently on hold. The lower court said
Speaker 1: he's entitled to get those requests, though is on hold
Speaker 1: while Trump asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal.
Speaker 1: The other case involves the House of Representatives and a committee,
Speaker 1: not the committee that's that's looking into impeaching President Trump,
Speaker 1: a committee that wants Trump's financial records as part of
Speaker 1: what it says is a potential legislative change to the
Speaker 1: federal ethics laws. Again, a federal appeals court has said
Speaker 1: the House is entitled to those documents. Trump is trying
Speaker 1: to get the Supreme Court to block that request, so
Speaker 1: Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the subpoena. Why explain
Speaker 1: that whole process that's in the House case. Had he
Speaker 1: not done that as it was set up, there was
Speaker 1: going to be a point where the House could have
Speaker 1: demanded that President Trump's accounting for a Mazurs turn over
Speaker 1: those documents. This just basically kept everything in place while
Speaker 1: the Court decides whether to issue a longer delay and
Speaker 1: then ultimately decide whether to take up the president's appeal.
Speaker 1: And here arguments so greg to other presidents have tried
Speaker 1: and failed to get out of legal processes at the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court. So what are the chances the justices will
Speaker 1: take this case? Probably pretty good ageven that there are
Speaker 1: two cases. You know, it might be possible to duck
Speaker 1: one of them. It's harder to duck two of them.
Speaker 1: It is the President of the United States asking for it.
Speaker 1: It may be that a majority of the justices on
Speaker 1: the court see his arguments as as a bit of
Speaker 1: a reach, because, particularly in the New York case, the
Speaker 1: president's private lawyer argued that the president has basically absolute
Speaker 1: immunity from any criminal investigations while he's in office. But
Speaker 1: it is the president he is saying, it is making
Speaker 1: it harder for me to do my job. Now, it
Speaker 1: would be quite something for the Supreme Court to say, no,
Speaker 1: we don't even want to hear that argument. We're not
Speaker 1: even going to entertain that. Let's turn to a case
Speaker 1: that the justices will be considering. That's the Google Oracle case.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that. Yeah, this is a case that
Speaker 1: is potentially worth billions of dollars. A federal appeals court
Speaker 1: lower court found that Google infringed Oracles copyrights on UH
Speaker 1: the so called application program interfaces, which are basically software
Speaker 1: code that allows one device to talk to another device,
Speaker 1: or or one program to talk to another program. Oracle
Speaker 1: sued Google for violating its copyrights and says we're owed
Speaker 1: something like nine billion with a B dollars. Google says,
Speaker 1: first of all, you can't copyright this sort of stuff,
Speaker 1: and second of all, even if you can, there's this
Speaker 1: doctrine called fair use that would let us use these
Speaker 1: application program interfaces and that should seld us from from liability.
Speaker 1: The Court didn't have to take this case. In fact,
Speaker 1: the Justice Department suggested the Court not take the case,
Speaker 1: but but they did, and it's gonna be a titanic
Speaker 1: fight within the tech industry. As you just described it,
Speaker 1: it's a very complicated case as far as the software,
Speaker 1: the interface, and the decision here was made by the
Speaker 1: Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court reversed
Speaker 1: the jury finding. That is a specialized court that handles
Speaker 1: these matters. So now we're gonna have a Supreme Court
Speaker 1: come in and handle this very technical kind of case,
Speaker 1: which the expert court in these matters reversed. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be interesting, of course, a Supreme Court that has
Speaker 1: a number of justices who aren't real tech savvy. But
Speaker 1: we've seen this before. This is UH with the Federal
Speaker 1: Circuit is also the court the handled patent cases. The
Speaker 1: Supreme Court has not been shy and re some years
Speaker 1: about jumping in and and saying mostly you're being too
Speaker 1: protective of patent rights. Federal Circuit UH, diving into the
Speaker 1: technology and dealing with it as best they can. You know,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court does think that that it is the
Speaker 1: one that needs to decide these especially important matters, even
Speaker 1: if if it means diving into a subject area that
Speaker 1: they don't have a whole lot of expertise. And I
Speaker 1: don't envy you being at the oral arguments in this case,
Speaker 1: because I remember some oral arguments in the past with
Speaker 1: issues involving technical matters, and I didn't mean to disparase
Speaker 1: Supreme Court justice is. In addition, Supreme Court reporters, including me,
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily that tech savvy, So it will be a
Speaker 1: challenge for all of us to try to understand what's
Speaker 1: really an issue in in this case and try to
Speaker 1: figure out how copyright law, which of course was written
Speaker 1: originally set up not thinking about application program interfaces but
Speaker 1: thinking more about more conventional words and the like be
Speaker 1: interesting to see how the court manages to apply the
Speaker 1: Copyright Act to to this area of computers. What kind
Speaker 1: of ramifications will this decision have on the tech industry?
Speaker 1: And they could be pretty significant, even putting aside we're
Speaker 1: talking about billions of dollars in this case alone, but
Speaker 1: beyond that, Google's argument is, look, these software code, software
Speaker 1: interfaces like this have always been freely available. That's that's
Speaker 1: Google's argument, and without it, innovation is going to suffer
Speaker 1: because if we can't get access to these things. Uh,
Speaker 1: they say, we can't build new products that use them.
Speaker 1: And UH. Oracle makes obviously a different argument where it says, look,
Speaker 1: we put a lot of money, a lot of work
Speaker 1: into these things, and we actually would have let Google
Speaker 1: use our our code. We just wanted them to agree
Speaker 1: to a license and we wanted them, among other things,
Speaker 1: to agree that whatever they did with it, it would
Speaker 1: be compatible with the Java programming language. That is what
Speaker 1: this is all about. And so if the case that
Speaker 1: has divided Silicon Valley to different ways of looking at
Speaker 1: rights to computer code, and it will be uh, probably
Speaker 1: extremely important for the tech industry going forward. And finally,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you about the health of Justice
Speaker 1: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who missed some moral arguments. Until this
Speaker 1: this year, she had never missed a Supreme Court argument
Speaker 1: because she was ill. Back in January, she missed a
Speaker 1: number of days because she was recovering from a cancer
Speaker 1: treatment of surgery, and she missed a day in this
Speaker 1: most recent sitting, just one day to arguments where she
Speaker 1: we were told had the stomach bug. But she was
Speaker 1: back on the bench of the following week and looked
Speaker 1: like the same Ruth Bader Ginsburg that we've been used
Speaker 1: to sing. Thanks Gregg, that's Bloomberg New Supreme Court reporter
Speaker 1: Greg Store. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast.
Speaker 1: You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple podcast, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brasso.
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