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Supreme Court May Decide the Fate of APIs (But Also Klingonese and Dothraki)

Posted by timothy on from the will-people-finally-stop-saying-frak? dept.

New submitter nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla v. Mothra, Google v. Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire nerd world. What is at stake is how a language can be [copyrighted]. This affects not just programming languages, APIs, and everything that runs ... well ... everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki.

2 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:SFLC's brief explains parts of this well by gnupun · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    then Oracle has no case. Or rather, the logical, nerdly conclusion would be that it has no case.

    LOL, a logical conclusion without any logic stated?

    all Google has done is re-impolement the API using Oracle's names and calling sequences but its own code

    So the implied logic here is Google only copied certain things, but not the whole thing, so it's okay to copy it for free?

  2. Re:SFLC's brief explains parts of this well by gnupun · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    then Compaq's reverse engineered BIOS was illegal and the whole era of the PC Clone was a violation of IBM's IP rights.

    Who knows if the decision to call it legal back then was okay, because software and the PC were very new. Everyone knows the importance of software today and you cant just rip off IP worth tens of millions for $0.

    We'd need to pry the BIOS out of every PC Compatible in existence.

    Why? Is there only one novel about cowboys? You can easily create another standard BIOS API that does not violate IBM's rights. But you'd have to recompile the OS and all the DOS apps to use the new API. Of course, all this is expensive for app developers, which is why apps should not use proprietary, OS specific APIs to code their apps. Rather they should call vendor-neutral standard APIs such that any vendor's software components can be replaced without recompiling the app. For example, you can choose Intel or AMD CPUs to execute your x86 instructions.

    Instead of using standardized APIs, your solution is to steal someone else's IP (API) because it's convenient.