Name: Supreme Court rules API copying is fair use
Brand: arstechnica.com
SKU: arstechnica-com-344
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Supreme Court rules API copying is fair use

preview

The Supreme Court has in its decade-long legal battle with Oracle over the copyright status of application programming interfaces. The ruling means that Google will not owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. It also has big implications for the broader software industry, since a ruling in the opposite direction could have triggered a wave of lawsuits against software companies that re-implemented other companies' APIs.The case dates back to the creation of the Android platform in the mid-2000s. Google decided to base Android on Sun's Java programming language, enabling existing Java programmers to easily develop for the platform. Google independently implemented the Java API methods, but to ensure compatibility, it copied Java's method names, argument types, and the class and package hierarchy.A few years later, Oracle acquired Sun and soon afterward sued Google, arguing that Google's copying had infringed Sun's copyrights. Over a decade of litigation, Google won twice at the trial court level, but each time, the was by the Federal Circuit appeals court. The case finally last year.Writing for a six-justice majority, Justice Stephen Breyer held that Google's copying of the Java API calls was permissible under copyright's fair use doctrine. The high court punted on whether APIs can be copyrighted in the first place. But the court's fair use reasoning was broad enough that it should provide a strong defense for most API copying, making the question of API copyrights much less important.We'll publish an in-depth analysis of the court's reasoning once we have time to fully digest it and see what the experts are saying.You must to comment.

The Supreme Court has in its decade-long legal battle with Oracle over the copyright status of application programming interfaces. The ruling means that Google will not owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. It also has big implications for the broader software industry, since a ruling in the opposite direction could have triggered a wave of lawsuits against software companies that re-implemented other companies' APIs.The case dates back to the creation of the Android platform in the mid-2000s. Google decided to base Android on Sun's Java programming language, enabling existing Java...

public

Timothy B. Lee began his journalism career writing for Ars in 2007. He then spent time at the Washington Post and Vox before returning home to Ars in 2017. Today he covers technology policy, artificial intelligence and the future of transportation. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Princeton. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.

Timothy B. Lee

Ars Technica is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Many of the site's writers are postgraduates and some work for research institutions. Articles on the website are written in a less-formal tone than those in traditional journals. Ars Technica was privately owned until May 2008, when it was sold to Condé Nast Digital, the online division of Condé Nast Publications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Technica

arstechnica.com

Credible

Speculation

Anecdotal Evidence

Generalization

Stacking the Deck

Appeal to Authority

Straw Man

Slippery Slope

Emotional Appeal

Red Herring

False Dilemma

Illogical

Moral Equivalency

Ad Hominem

Correlation w/o Causation

Semantics

Begging the Question

Faulty Analogy

Non Sequitur

Bandwagon

Dogmatism

Failing Occam's Razor

Biased

Pure Opinion

Hit Piece

Racial Bias

National Bias

Religious Bias

Financial Incentive

Political Agenda

Gender Bias

Misused Image/Video

Study Misinterpreted

Mistake

Misused Term

Science Misrepresented

Factual Error

Satire

Surface Level

Lack of Reliable Sources

Sensational

Not Credible

Investigative

Balanced

Well Sourced

Great Context

sports

entertainment

U.S.

international

business

technology

science

culture

politics

media

health

Supreme Court rules API copying is fair use

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS