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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.
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.