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by jcranmer 2410 days ago
The current holding that APIs are copyrightable, and reimplementing them for interoperability is not fair use.

This is in direct contrast to decades of consensus that APIs are not copyrightable, and furthermore, there is a particular procedure to go through [clean room technique, which Google did] to ensure that the API is reimplemented without infringing any copyright.

Letting this ruling stand would mean that nearly every piece of software you use infringed someone's copyright.

1 comments

Ah, gotcha - so the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit* decided in favor of Oracle in this case. Thanks for taking the time to type that out, I've been living under a bit of a rock it seems!

*corrected from "second district court"

The CAFC, not the second district.