Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules API's Can Not Be Copyrighted
Asmodae writes "Judge Alsup in the Oracle vs Google case has finally issued his ruling on the issue of whether or not APIs can be copyrighted. That ruling is resounding no. In some fairly clear language the judge says: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.'"
Yes, the case went as it should have, once it was boiled down to the fundamentals there was only one way it could go.
But let's not forget that Google did do something inherently prick-ish, they took a language and a concept that was open for everyone and popular specifically because of it's interoperability and broke the interoperability of it in their own clone.
What I'm getting at is: when a multi-billion dollar company can take something you made available with the best of intentions (don't care if Sun's intentions were good or not, the open-sourcing of Java was) and shit all over you and the ecosystem that it aids, everyone loses.
It's possible that the next time something like Java is being considered as an open-source target that the owners will carefully plan and consider how they can make it available without the same thing happening. But it's far, far more likely that they just won't bother at all.
Google's win here is a hollow one; Oracle's win would have been outright horrible, but this is only the lesser of two evils.