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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?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:15PM
You seem to be conflating Dalvik and the Playwall, but your overall criticism of the state of Android from the perspective of extricating Google from the OS is spot-on. However, there's more to Java than “apping app appers” (as whoever likes to post at random).
I've been dabbling with server-side Java the past few years (mostly Apache alternatives to Hibernate/Jersey/etc) with the rationale that if Oracle went full retard, there would always be Iced Tea [classpath.org]. My Gentoo box at home has Iced Tea instead of Oracle Java and it works just fine.
Everyone thinks Android and applets when Java comes up, but the open source ecosystem for server-side stuff is a cornucopia. I'm not necessarily a fan of Java as a language, but the ecosystem sold me on it.
This situation is fairly disturbing. I never would have thought that an API would be copyrightable. Well, they're going fuller retard than I believed was possible. Crank the retardation to 11!
If re-implementing the Java APIs turns out not to be fair use, the real shame will be losing the ability to legally run Iced Tea, and along with that, some very good libraries will suddenly be dead to me.
Perhaps it's time to polish up on C++. C++11 may actually be usable! (Well, not that C++ wasn't, but I'm loving the auto keyword and user-defined types. I'm sure there's plenty of unexpected-ness there to hang myself. Just need to wrap my head around the semantics of C++ lambdas.)