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SCOTUS Denies Google's Request To Appeal Oracle API Case
New submitter Neil_Brown writes: The Supreme Court of the United States has today denied Google's request to appeal against the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's ruling (PDF) that the structure, sequence and organization of 37 of Oracle's APIs (application program interfaces) was capable of copyright protection. The case is not over, as Google can now seek to argue that, despite the APIs being restricted by copyright, its handling amounts to "fair use". Professor Pamela Samuelson has previously commented (PDF) on the implications if SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal. The Verge reports: "A district court ruled in Google's favor back in 2012, calling the API "a utilitarian and functional set of symbols" that couldn't be tied up by copyrights. Last May, a federal appeals court overturned that ruling by calling the Java API copyrightable. However, the court said that Google could still have lawfully used the APIs under fair use, sending the case back to a lower court to argue the issue. That's where Google will have to go next, now that the Supreme Court has declined to hear the issue over copyright itself.
One of the things that came out during the SCO mess was that SCO didn't own the Unix copyrights. Novell still had them, and Novell wasn't interested in using them to make trouble for Linux. (At least not then, anyway.)
So this ruling doesn't do SCO's pathetic "case" any good.
The C++ standard library is already licensed to the public through ISO, as are the POSIX APIs through IEEE.
Having had personal technical experience with both Java ME and Android, I gotta say that from a technology point of view, Java ME was a complete and total dead-end. It was far, far different from vanilla desktop/server java than Android is and therefore had practically zero notice or integration with the Java ecosystem. It was designed to work within the restrictions of devices that had single or double-digit CPU MHz and RAM MBs. It was modelled around Java 1.1, with almost no new language features or APIs. RIM used it as the basis for Blackberry and as a developer, I can tell you it was a decision they regretted.
Android is essentially vanilla Java with only the most esoteric of APIs removed from it, and then device-specific APIs placed on top of it. You can use 95% of existing java desktop/server libraries without any modification. If Google was given the option of using Java ME absolutely for free, or developing their own language and APIs, I guarantee they would have made their own because there would have been a riot among their software developers who would have been forced to essentially develop all of the libraries and google apps using the software equivalent of alphabet blocks and duplo. The additional "device profiles" that were subsequently released were too little, too late and hardly any of them were adopted into devices. I can't imagine any situation where Google would have paid Sun or Oracle for a Java ME license.