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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.'"
Thankfully we have Obama, since if the Republicans were in power things could've turned out much differently!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
It would have been bad, but not the end of the world as people keep believing. Calling APIs would have almost certainly been a fair use exemption and pretty much no vendor is likely actually sue over it even if it wasn't. You might have had some issues calling undocumented APIs, and stuff like WINE and SAMBA could have had issues if Microsoft had felt particularly inclined to do so.
The biggest problem with this case is that both sides need to lose. Dalvik needs to be stopped, and copyrighting APIs needs to be stopped, more importantly someone needs to take the execs at Google into the alley out the back and beat them until they promise to stop doing this kind of shit. They knew damned well what they were doing and they've rolled the dice at terrible risk to everyone and spent millions of dollars getting into a pissing match they never should have started. If they'd just licensed Java in the first place none of this would have been necessary.
The same way you can judge abortion is killing an unborn child and murder is wrong.