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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.
> Google illegally copied Oracle's shit. Deal with it.
This would make sense to anybody who has never done any actual programming.
A function name and parameter spec is now "someone's shit"? Oracle's position is about as sensible as SCO's was.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Actually, he might have a valid point. If an api is subject to copyright, wouldn't that make a whole bunch of closed source things in violation of the gpl? For example, the closed source nvidia drivers include some of the kernel api, so are they now subject to gpl?
I suspect that (1) there is a license allowing the inclusion of header files, for example the GPL license terms might allow this, (2) NVidia is merely using, but not copying the header files (unlike Google), and (3) if someone insisted that NVidia can't include kernel header files to build its drivers, then instead of a GPL'd driver Linux users will end up with no driver. And if the same thing happens with ARM / AMD, then good night Linux.
And yet something written against the Java API can fairly trivially be made to work against the Google API -- well, in theory.
The interfaces for APIs have been borrowed and re-implemented for literally decades. If you retroactively go back and say all of them are licensed and you need to pay money ... you fuck up the entirety of computing history.
Like I said, the standard C library, most of POSIX, the C++ template libraries, Mono ... all sorts of stuff was basically a re-implementation of an API.
This ruling completely ignores several decades worth of precedent, and grants Oracle something nobody else has ever had.
Hell, even Microsoft's vaporware to provide Android support is covered by this. This has very far reaching implications, and makes no sense in the context of computers since the 70s.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Correct. And _unfortunately_ structure is very much copyrightable. I personally thought that the trial court's opinion which found for Google very strong and persuasive. But anybody who actually knows copyright law knows that the trial court was going out on a limb, and it should surprise _nobody_ that he was overturned on appeal, and that SCOTUS declined to come to his rescue.
Look, you guys need to stop listening to people who work at the Harvard Berkman Center, or similar FOSS advocates with law degrees. We should all _hope_ that their arguments will become the law of the land some day. But their interpretations of copyright law are sadly far from the mainstream. They make it sound like their arguments are slam dunks, but remember that they're lawyers! Worse, they're legal academics! Their whole purpose in life is to persuade people to adopt their perspectives, and what better way to do that than tell people flat out that their perspective is obvious, intuitive, and uncontroversial.
Hopefully Google will still win on Fair Use. It would have been much better if the appeals courts held that APIs were simply not copyrightable. But the fact of the matter is that such a ruling would have been a significant change in copyright law. The appeals courts weren't persuaded to take that step. Them doing so was made less likely by the fact that Fair Use provides a convenient way for courts to mitigate the impact of strong copyright law in narrow cases. So, for example, if they had held that the structure of code and APIs was not copyrightable, it would have had far reaching implications for other fields, like music, film, etc. IMO that would have been a good thing, but the appeals courts didn't want to rock the boat. A Fair Use exception will allow them (if they choose) to effectively exclude APIs without threatening to upturn industry expectations generally.
A Fair Use exception will allow them (if they choose) to effectively exclude APIs without threatening to upturn industry expectations generally.
Unfortunately, fair use claims are judged on a case-by-case basis. Even if Google prevails on this issue, API implementation will be too risky for individual programmers or small companies to undertake.
.: Semper Absurda