[ratel]

Oracle will argue anything as long as it suites them. That seems to be the nature of modern litigation.

Fact in this matter is that the license for the Amazon API does allow the API to be copied. But Oracle did and does not follow the license, because the required attribution is missing. They are therefor not protected by the license. It is like using an illegal copy of Windows and claiming you had the right to use it under the license for the small omission of not having paid for it.

Even if the change the code to include attribution they are still liable for significant damages to Amazon for the period preceding the correction. Amazon can claim to them the attribution is a very significant part of the license agreement: It would deter competitors having to advertise Amazon and tell their customers that their product was actually invented by someone having a competing product.

Google can claim their fair use was actually already common practice, as most of us thought. Even Oracle itself assumed and acted on that assumption that copying APIs was fair use / not copyrightable and did not require following a license agreement, as they did not. Worst case for Google is that they should not have to pay significant damages for something they and others would see as a common mistake and Oracle's reversal complying with the Amazon license is proof that there was no established judicial practice to follow.

So Oracle is in a pickle: Either they claim copying the Amazon API was fair-use, or APIs are not copyrightable and they lose the case against Google. Or they claim that the license of Amazon allowed for copying of the API and they violated that license. The harder they push Google in the later case the bigger the risk Amazon will claim their share of Oracle's pie in return. Better get the spreadsheets out.

[fauigerzigerk]

Oracle claims to be in compliance with the license. In my opinion, that's all they need to do in order to completely separate the two cases and make it clear that they are not relying on a fair use defense. It doesn't matter whether or not they are eventually found to be in breach of Amazon's license.

Also, the potential damages in these two cases are presumably very different. Google built an entire industry on top of Android whilst Oracle is limping along with a me-too cloud offering, some tiny part of which uses Amazon's API. So I think Oracle would gladly take the risk of losing that case if they can win the other one.

[voxic11]

But the license is for an SDK that talks to the API not the API itself which is what they reimplemented. It's like if Google claimed that since Oracle once released an Apache licenced Java application that means they can reimplement any Java APIs that application used.

[fauigerzigerk]

My point is that Oracle doesn't have to be right in their potential dispute with Amazon. All they have to do is use a defense that does not rely on denying copyrightability of APIs or on fair use. And that's what they are doing by referring to the SDK license.