Google Asks Supreme Court To Rule On When Code Can Be Copyrighted (theverge.com)

Google is asking the Supreme Court to make the final call in its infamous dispute with Oracle. "Today, the company announced it has filed a petition with the Court, asking the justices to determine the boundaries of copyright law in code," reports The Verge. From the report: The case dates back to 2010, when Oracle first accused Google of improperly using elements of Oracle's Java programming language to build Android. Oracle said that Google's use of Java application programing interfaces was a violation of copyright law. Google has responded that APIs are too fundamental to programming to be copyrighted. The case has led to two jury trials, and several rulings have doled out wins and losses to both companies over the course of eight years. Last year, a favorable Oracle decision set Google up to potentially lose billions of dollars.

Google asked for a Supreme Court hearing on the case in 2014, but the Court rejected the request at the time. The company says new issues are now at play, and is asking the Court to decide whether software interfaces can be copyrighted, and whether using them to build something new constitutes fair use under the law. In its new petition to the Supreme Court, Google says the case is not only important to copyright law, but has "sheer practical importance," as it centers around two touchstones of computing: Google's Android and Oracle's Java. The Court's intervention could alter the future of software, the company argues.

Comments

Re:Fingers Crossed!

[Areyoukiddingme]

Good joke. As if Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are going to vote against corporate interests.

It's Google v Oracle. There's a megacorporation on both sides of the courtroom. The Supreme Court is going to vote against someone's corporate interest, if they grant the writ at all.

Google had better have been eloquent beyond all measure. Their lawyers have been working on this writ of certiorari since before October. If they fail to convince the Supreme Court to grant a hearing, it's all over and Oracle wins and software as an industry basically ends, swallowed by lawyers.

For those playing along at home, if the last ruling in Oracle's favor stands, Novell essentially owns the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel reimplements the UNIX kernel API. If the ruling by the blithering idiots in the Court of Appeals is allowed to stand, that's illegal without a license. Novell's lawyers would have to write a license to allow Linux to continue to exist. All of the standard system libraries, especially things like libc, would become embroiled in legal battles to determine who owes what to whom. Odds are, Microsoft's implementation of libc is too new, and Microsoft would require a license from someone else to keep it. But the parts that are C99 were developed jointly, so it could take centuries of lawyer-time to figure out who owns what.

We're going to hope that Google's lawyers were able to convey all of this to the Supreme Court. They'd better. There were 11 lawyers involved and the writ is 343 pages.

Who owns the Posix/*nix API

[aberglas]

If Google loses, what happens to Unix?

I can imagine that the court would rule that merely copying the style of the API is not copyright. But copying the exact text of it, down to the names of the methods is another matter entirely.

You cannot copyright a genre of novels, or the types of characters within. But you can certainly copyright specific characters with specific names.

It flows exactly to *Nix. SCO might live again.

We would have to go through all of our applications and rename the methods. Or new legislation would need to be passed, which is unthinkable.

Interestingly, a big loser in that would be Oracle themselves. They should have bought SCO (or whoever now "owns" Unix) before starting this. Then they could have it all.

Re:JHMFC. Overreact much?

[Areyoukiddingme]

Freely-available UNIX implementations have been available for DECADES . BSD. Linux. Hell, Solaris was open-sourced at one point.

And the owners of what you call "the UNIX kernel API" did NOTHING.

Doesn't matter. Estoppel doesn't apply. Novell didn't make any promises not to exert their copyright. They didn't know they could exert their copyright, until the Federal Circuit starting blathering around in not one but two idiot rulings. Depending on who you ask, they still can't. The Second, Fifth, and Tenth Circuits all say APIs aren't copyrightable at all, so the whole question of fair use is moot. The Third and Federal Circuits say they are copyrightable. The Federal Circuit went even farther, saying they're copyrightable and there's no way to make fair use of any API.

I read the 21 relevant pages from Google's writ, and I'd say it'll be granted. The second half of it hinges on fair use, and it's a weaker argument. The first half is all about the disagreements among the circuit courts, and that always attracts the attention of the Supreme Court.

Google's lawyers did attempt to address the earth-shattering ramifications if the Federal Circuit's ruling is allowed to stand, but not as much as I'd like. Hopefully they were saving the best parts of that for oral arguments. This Supreme Court has spent years asking, "Where's the harm?" and if you can't answer, you lose. If Google's lawyers successfully convey the harm, they have a good chance. They'd better describe the harm to all software everywhere though, not just the harm to Google software.

Google did point out that the Federal Circuit (full name United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) is disingenuous at best, malicious at worst, in their second overturning of the jury verdict that declared Google's use of Java APIs fair use. The Federal Circuit said that they assumed all findings of fact were completed by the jury (as they're required to do), then they contradicted both themselves and the jury and tossed out the verdict. I'm starting to wonder if the Federal Circuit botched their ruling on purpose in order to precipitate intervention by the Supreme Court.