Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Kranar 354 days ago
>the Supreme Court confirmed—that they own copyright in the APIs.

To use your own terminology, this is clearly and objectively false. The US Supreme Court made no such finding.

What the court concluded was that even if Oracle had a copyright on the API, Google's use of it fell under fair use so that making a ruling on the question of whether the API was protected by copyright was moot.

1 comments

Your point of order is partially accurate. It was the Federal Circuit that held APIs copyrightable. SCOTUS did not disturb that holding, but did not explicitly affirm it either. However, your contention that this makes copyrightability moot is a stretch.
The majority opinion in Google v Oracle did an involved fair use analysis for the reimplementation of the API that really makes it clear that it's hard for anybody to violate the copyright of an API by doing a clean-room implementation and not have it be covered by fair use.
[flagged]