Google Takes the Fight With Oracle To the Supreme Court

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.)

Comments

17 USC 102(b)

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain how it's not a slam-dunk argument that APIs fall under the scope limitation of 17 USC 102(b)? Isn't that a key underpinning of decades of case law on very nearly this exact subject (Computer Associates v. Altai, Lotus v. Borland, Sega v. Accolade, Sony v. Connectix)?

(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

Re:Oracle

[Charliemopps]

I'm trying to recall slashdot's reaction about a decade ago when the courts said that Microsoft couldn't ship their own version of the JRE with windows to run java applications.

I think it was lauded as crushing anti-competitive behavior. How is Google shipping their own custom JRE on phones they control 70% of the market for that different? I mean other than that they won't let you override the install with the Oracle version?

I agree that Oracle can die in a fire, and I will not shed a single tear, but for consistency's sake, is there something different here?

Yea, it's amazing how the public sides with the company that isn't trying to screw them at every turn.
Google is generally nice to us...
Microsoft and Oracle are about the biggest Jerks in tech...
Funny how that works, eh?

A similar situation:
I hate you because you slept with my wife, and you snag a beer our of my fridge? My reaction would be?
You just gave me a ride home after my car broken down, and you snag a beer our of the fridge. My reaction again?

Is that a double standard?

If Oracle wins, Bell Labs owns the world.

[emil]

The full source code of the UNIX v6 kernel, as published in the Lions commentary, bore prominent copyright notices from AT&T Bell Labs.

If the system call and C library API interface is thus still owned by Bell Labs, then that covers Oracle Linux, the POSIX standard, commercial UNIX, as well as all the phones (including QNX), routers, UNIX/Linux/BSD servers/workstations, and likely much more.

Oracle had better pray that they lose.

Re:If Oracle wins, Bell Labs owns the world.

[Forever Wondering]

The AT&T copyrights were the genesis of POSIX. Nobody could create a workalike Un*x, so POSIX was originally a "clean room" reimplementation of the Un*x API's [libc, programs, et. al.]. POSIX now serves as a standard, but that wasn't its original purpose.

Because the POSIX methodology has been around for 30 years, it provides some precedent/defense for Google [estoppel].

If Oracle's argument prevails, this kills all Linux, *BSD [OSX] workalike OSes. Also, because ISO copyrights the C/C++ specs [to charge a fee to have a copy], this means that nobody could program in C/C++ without a license from ISO.

The Oracle/Google decision by the appellate court is tantamount to conferring patent protections for a copyright. That is, because Louis L'Amour copyrighted his western novels, nobody else can pen a western.