Declaring Code Is Not Code, Says Larry Page (arstechnica.com)

Alphabet CEO Larry Page says his company never considered getting permission from Oracle for using the latter's Java APIs in Android. Page, who appeared in a federal court, said Java APIs are open and free, which warrants them or anyone to use it without explicit permission from Oracle. From an Ars Technica report (edited for clarity): "But you did copy the code and copy the structure, sequence, and organization of the APIs?" Oracle attorney Peter Bicks asked, raising his voice. "I don't agree with 'copy code,'" Page said. "For me, declaring code is not code," Page said. "Have you paid anything to Oracle for using that intellectual property?" Bicks asked. "When Sun established Java, they established it as an open source thing," Page said. "I believe the APIs we used were pretty open. No, we didn't pay for the free and open things." [...] "Was Google seeking a license for Java?" Google lawyer Robert Van Nest asked. "Yes, and a broader deal around other things, like branding and cooperation," Page said. "After discussions with Sun broke off, did you believe Google needed a license for APIs?" Van Nest asked. "No, I did not believe that," Page said. "It was established industry practice that the API and just the headers of those things could be taken and re-implemented. [It must be done] very carefully, not to use any existing implementation of those systems. That's been done many, many times. I think we acted responsibly and carefully around these intellectual property issues."

Comments

Giant problem

[NotInHere]

If APIs are copyrightable, this will be a huge problem for projects like Wine (which implements Microsoft APIs), and GNU/Linux (which implements Bell labs APIs).

Re:Giant problem

[peragrin]

Only after SCO sues IBM for trillions.

Oracles argument was used in SCO vs IBM and it was tossed there too. Headers are not copyright able.

Re:Compaq copied APIs from IBM

[drerwk]

Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS. It did not copy the text of some file that defined the API. I don't think that the INT operations even had fixed names - they had numbers. So a BIOS call would be documented as http://stanislavs.org/helppc/i...
INT 16,0 Wait for keystroke and read
This exact operation can be described using different words e.g.
On Int 16,0 the system will pause until a keystroke is pressed and the value will be placed in AH.
I understand the issue in Oracle v. Google to be exact copying of some number of interfere files. Such files did not exist for BIOS as far as I recall.

Re:Books, Music, and APIs

[dgatwood]

In general, the fact that something is a creative work or takes time to create doesn't necessarily make it copyrightable. For a creative work, any functional aspects of that design are supposed to be protected by patents, not copyright. And an insufficiently creative work isn't protected at all, no matter how much time it took to create it.

For example, the courts long ago ruled in Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. that the difficulty of creating something is not sufficient to make it copyrightable when they declared that a phone book is a non-creative collection of facts. One could reasonably argue that a header file collects the declarations from source code, and that the real creative work is the source code itself. After all, the sole reason for a header file is to consolidate a bunch of declarations into a form that that makes it easier for a compiler to digest. This arguably makes a header no more a creative work than the phone book. That's not arguing that an API shouldn't be copyrightable per se, so much as that a header shouldn't be unless it contains other creative works beyond the declarations.

Also, per 17 U.S.C. section 1302, anything that is "dictated solely by a utilitarian function of the article that embodies it" is not eligible for copyright. The intent of copyright law is to shift responsibility for protecting such creative works into the domain of patent law. So given that there's a strong utilitarian aspect to APIs (because any function has basically exactly one valid declaration, or else your code won't link correctly), if you want to argue that an API should be protected by copyright, you have to come up with a concrete argument of why that API's design is more than just utilitarian in nature. So any creative effort that was focused on making an API easier to use doesn't count towards the creativity requirement for copyright purposes.

Much like what already happened with encryption.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Software companies will all close shop in the U.S. and move their operations to countries where APIs are legally declared not copyrightable. ... The U.S. will be relegated to a software backwater, as most of the software made and sold in the rest of the world cannot legally be distributed in the U.S.

Something similar to this happened with encryption. The US regulated it as a weapon and banned / limited / added red tape to the export of strong encryption software. US companies also couldn't import strong encryption software, include it in their products, and resell them elsewhere. The software had to be installed outside the US by non-US companies.

The result was that commercial development and deployment of strong encryption software pretty much stopped in the US and picked up outside its boundaries for several years, and various workarounds were developed (such as "encryption with a hole" so a strong encryption module could be installed later).

This continued up to about the turn of the centur, when laws, policies, and court decisions loosened things up enough that US companies could play again.