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The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Obama administration for its views on an appeals court’s conclusion that Oracle’s Java application programming interfaces are protected by copyright.

The move (PDF) by the justices indicates that the high court is interested in the hotly contested intellectual property dispute. But whether the Supreme Court will enter the legal thicket won’t be announced until after the administration responds in the coming months.

The legal fracas started when Google copied certain elements—names, declaration, and header lines—of the Java APIs in Android, and Oracle sued. A San Francisco federal judge largely sided with Google in 2012, saying that the code in question could not be copyrighted.