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Google Takes the Fight With Oracle To the Supreme Court

Posted by timothy on from the by-the-power-your-black-robe-we-beseech-thee dept.

whoever57 writes Google has asked the Supreme Court to review the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted. Google beat Oracle in the trial court, where a judge with a software background ruled that APIs could not be copyrighted. but the Appeals court sided with Oracle, ruling that APIs can be copyrighted. Now Google is asking the Supreme Court to overturn that decision. (Also of interest.)

8 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Oracle by Kagetsuki · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck you. You are everything wrong with the software industry.

    1. Re: Oracle by Zombywuf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You mean where Google comes along, does a ton of work, and for some reason doesn't think it should have to pay someone else for the work they did?

      Seems completely fair to me.

      --
      If you can read this you've gone too far.
    2. Re: Oracle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're forgetting that Sun Microsystems was responsible for Java, and google went ahead on Android with Sun's blessing. Only aftrer Orcale bought them out did this animosity start.

      Java was open sourced. You cannot retroactively change your mind if you become bitter that somebody built something really great with it and is being rewarded for it. That's the point of such licenses. Nobody would trust open source otherwise.

    3. Re: Oracle by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you think that's fair, or legal?

      Yes. The purpose of copyright is to protect creativity, not work. The "sweat of the brow" doctrine has been rejected by the US Supreme Court. The creativity should be what lies behind the API, not the API itself. The API itself allows for NO creativity, since even the slightest deviation causes it to fail. Therefore APIs should not be copyrightable. Furthermore, there is a compelling public interest in a competitive market for software, and locked down APIs are a hindrance to that.

    4. Re: Oracle by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It requires lots of ingenuity and creativity to come up with a set of api.

      Sure, but someone else cannot then use different ingenuity and creativity to reimplement the API so that their API works with the same third party applications. They have no choice but to reimplement it exactly. There is precedent for these sorts of interfaces being non-copyrightable. See Lexmark vs SCC. That was a case of Lexmark trying to copyright the handshake protocol to keep third parties from producing compatible printer cartridges. This is the same issue.

      Not much different than coming up with a plot for movie with intricate relations between characters and their personalities.

      This is not a valid analogy, because someone else can make a movie with a different plot, and it will still work in the same movie projectors.

    5. Re:Oracle by rahvin112 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Microsoft lost because they had a contract with Sun which said they wouldn't modify the Java Runtime to be incompatible with the standard. They did exactly that. Sun was pretty much guaranteed a win because they had a contract with MS.

      Would Sun win if MS had never signed a contract and done a clean room implementation of Java and not called it Java? That I suppose would depend on whether API's are copyrightable which is what Google is asking the court to review.

    6. Re: Oracle by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Since it's copyrighted, but not patented (or patentable), you could redesign Linux or *BSD APIs that are similar in principle and operation as the POSIX APIs, but not a complete copy.

      Which would have meant that porting code from UNIX to Linux/*NIX would have required shim layers. Worse, it would mean that every program that uses these APIs would be a derived work of UNIX and the UNIX license could prohibit the use of such shim layers.

      Just because it affects your pet project does not make it legal.

      It's not about my 'pet project', it's about the entire computing landscape. I'd actually be quite happy with a ruling in favour of Oracle: it would completely destroy a large segment of the US software industry and promote investment nearer me...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Oracle trying to undo the GPL decision by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oracle are clearly trying to pull Java back from public domain and back to within Oracles control to undo the GPL license Java is under. It's a clever lawyer trick, but Java itself uses copyrighted APIs.

    Java was not the first to use Vector, or String classes or Views or any other API and classes it built on. It would be difficult to even identify which *names* of classes are actually new APIs and which are copied from others.

    In Oracle's mind, it thinks if it can get away with this is can seize Android, which contains a Java compatible API named set, even though it doesn't use Java and the code is not theirs. But that API set is itself copied from many previous products.

    Why do we have trademarks if you can copyright the name of something? (Which is what an API is, its the names of the methods).