At multiple points in the decision, the Court considered the public interest in allowing developers to more easily transfer their skills from project to project, job to job. While I hoped for a stronger ruling, 'fair use' is a win for developers and innovation. After all, as Justice Breyer wrote in the decision:. Google copied portions of the Sun Java API precisely, and it did so in part for the same reason that Sun created those portions, namely, to enable programmers to call up implementing programs that would accomplish particular tasks.
But since virtually any unauthorized use of a copyrighted computer program say, for teaching or research would do the same, to stop here would severely limit the scope of fair use in the functional context of computer programs.
Rather, in determining whether a use is 'transformative,' we must go further and examine the copying's more specifically described 'purpose[s]' and 'character.
As Laurence Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at the Harvard Law School, tweeted: "Google's win over Oracle with respect to fair use of the Java API software interface was a well-reasoned victory over an outmoded reading of the copyright laws.
Michael Barclay, an Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF special counsel, declared: " In a win for innovation … This decision gives more legal certainty to software developers' common practice of using, reusing, and re-implementing software interfaces written by others, a custom that underlies most of the internet and personal computing technologies we use every day.
This is also a win for open-source and free software developers. The Supreme Court's ruling in Google v. Oracle affirms that US copyright law's fair use defense is fully consistent with the free-software movement's long-standing position that API declarations should not be subject to copyright license restrictions, and may be freely used for interoperation and the independent re-implementation of software APIs.
Borland [the famous case which found that Lotus 's command menu hierarchy couldn't be copyrighted] in , this has always been our position and was our position in the amicus brief we filed in the present case.
Today's decision is a welcome step to provide clarity on this point after decades of uncertainty and is very gratifying to all who believe in software freedom. But what if you do want to protect your API's intellectual property? The most pragmatic and practical result from this case's conclusion is that developers can now use APIs without worry.
Unless expressly closed and protected, APIs are now free and open and that's a big win both for programmers and for the users who will benefit from their software. It looks like the very same approach many of us have been advocating, towards designing APIs based upon a few conventional patterns and prescriptively following the practically-RESTful paradigm, will also ease our legal concerns.
Let us now advocate harder for prescriptive API design based on sensible, repeatable principles, and hone those down with examples of how they can be applied in various domains. Let us pursue with greater urgency the establishment of API recipes and examples and patterns, and create repositories for everyone across the ecosystem to share.
Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. So, with this latest ruling, is the sky falling? Maybe, and maybe not. If you do, including the documentation of each and every parameter and function call, of every area of functionality, with no changes, verbatim, you have less of a fair use defense.
To what extent is the marketability of the original work harmed by the copy? This one seems very open-ended. Originally posted by:. Uri Sarid. View original post. Skip Social. Skip to: Latest News. Maybe not forever, though, because forever is a long time. The details of the battle between Google and Oracle will be of interest to lawyers and programmers who are immersed in Java development for the Android platform, but the larger question about copyrightability affects almost every programmer who calls hundreds or millions of APIs almost every day.
Should APIs be copyrighted? How much power should programmers have over others? Here are N different reasons that argue both for and against giving the programmers the power over their APIs. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out.
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