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posted by janrinok on Monday June 29 2015, @11:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the grab-some-popcorn dept.

TheVerge is reporting the Supreme Court has declined to hear the long-running Google, Inc. v. Oracle America, Inc. case concerning copyright over the Java APIs. This is an important case, because it sets precedent if publicly documented software APIs can be copyrighted. This has relevance throughout the FOSS community, from Wine (reimplementing the Windows API) to Octave (reimplementing the MATLAB API).

A brief history of events: The original decision, handed down in 2012 in district court, found strongly against Oracle that APIs were not protected by copyright. Oracle appealed, and the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court decision, finding the "structure, sequence and organization" of an API was copyrightable.

Google petitioned SCOTUS to hear the case. The Court seemed unsure, and requested the input of the Solicitor General (Donald Verrilli, appointed by Barack Obama). Mr. Verrilli replied with a brief instructing SCOTUS not to hear the case. Today, SCOTUS officially declined to hear arguments.

By declining to hear arguments SCOTUS defers to the appeals court ruling: APIs are copyrightable. Google may still have a defense under the Fair Use doctrine, but now all other users of APIs will have to prove Fair Use if a suit is brought. There is no option to overturn this precedent save a new case working through the courts. Soylentils, what will the effects of this decision be? Have you used or reverse-engineered code from public APIs in your own work?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday June 30 2015, @02:20AM

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @02:20AM (#203144) Journal

    This is a case that would never have happened had Google just wanted to USE the APIs.

    Where ORACLE got the undies in a knot was that Google really wanted to build a replacement for the JVMs that Oracle was selling which was to be compatible at the API level, so zero code change would be needed.

    I've done this same thing while moving code from one compiler to another. Write a subroutine that mimics Compiler A's api but calls the comparable api from Compiler B, (or my own). Anybody who has managed large code bases for more than a couple years has been through this kind of migration a few times, with APIs, File Access routines, Databases, etc. Its far cheaper to make a simple function map routine than it is to dig through mountains of code of various vintage. Sometimes you can write code munging software to go fix every instance of the original API invocations when the approve approach can't be done. (Hell I wrote an engine for that as well). But most big conversion projects try to keep the API invocations in place, because every line you touch is a line you may break.

    In fact the original developers of the APIs in question, who were with SUN at the time have no problem with the Google's plan, and said so on many occasions.

    Its not an insurmountable problem. Its just a huge annoyance. Chances are just a minor munge on the API text with a code pre-processor to insert or re-order API elements is all that is needed. Maybe there should be a huge push to get all such APIs into the public domain with a non-retractable dedication.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @02:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @02:38AM (#203148)

    push to get ... into the public domain

    "Public domain"? What's that? You mean that mythical thing that copyright was supposed to enrich but has instead been used to mercilessly rape and pillage our culture?