You have to pay Oracle to develop Java apps? That is news to me. I thought the idea was to offer the JDK for free to spur adoption. Is that only the JRE? Does the same "no-commerce without paying Oracle" apply to JavaScript or Node.js?
Oracle won and now they're going to try to bleed Google dry on the Android front.
I believe the 1st amendment provides for this.
My hope is that Google does not settle the case with Oracle, as I'm sure this case shows up at the top of their legal budget.
But "copyright protection can extend to APIs" is all that the courts' decisions amount to so far. As the article says, the case has been remanded back to the district court, which will be trying to answer the question, "Given that APIs are not inherently unprotected, are Google's actions in this case punishable, or did they amount to fair use?"
Here's how that's gonna go:
Allsup is almost definitely going to find it fair use, and (with a little less certainty) the Federal Circuit is going to reverse that decision when Oracle appeals it. At that point, we're back to waiting to see if the Supreme Court will hear Google's arguments, but this time their argument will be that, APIs being unprotected or not, their actions were essentially no different than the ones the Supreme Court determined were defensible in Lexmark v. Static Control in pursuit of interoperability. First Amendment probably won't actually factor in to this.
This is assuming that neither Oracle nor Google capitulates before it makes it that far. Oracle probably won't. Google might.
That's not an affirmation. An affirmation would be if the Supreme Court took the case, and agreed with the Federal Court. This is "we're not going to bother", which leaves the decision as good precedent in that Federal court (but not in any other).
It is true that they implicitly affirmed the decision in this particular case, but as to the larger question of copyrightability of APIs, as I mention above, the reasoning for denial could just as easily be they didn't think this case would be a good test for that question for whatever reason.
Wikipedia cites a few cases in which the Supreme Court has explicitly stated this in [1] (see paragraph starting with "Conversely...")
This is one of the reasons why the FSF, for instance, sided with Google but still urged the Supreme Court not to take the case. They said the GPLed OpenJDK already gave Google the right to the APIs in question, but also noted that there wasn't precedent any court needed to defer to for the Supreme Court to address anyways.
Simply the act of "develop[ing] Java apps" falls entirely within a fair interpretation of the license. The difference is best understood in the Solicitor General's Brief (pg. 5 http://www.scribd.com/doc/266703948/Goog-v-Oracle-Solicitor-...):
Although a Java programmer is free to write new code from scratch without relying on prewritten methods, the Java Standard Library provides convenient building blocks for writing computer programs.
Although respondent [Oracle] does not claim a copyright interest in the Java language itself, respondent owns a copyright in the Java Standard Library. Pet App. 7. Respondent makes the Java Standard Library available to computer programmers under any of three copyright licenses, including a conditional royalty-free license. See id. at 7-8.
On page 7: Petitioner [Google] assets that it copied the declaring code so that programmers familiar with the Java platform would be able to switch over to the Android platform without having to learn entirely new commands for invoking commonly used methods.
In total, petitioner copied approximately 7000 lines of declaring code.
Herein lies the core issue -- Google did not have a prearranged license agreement to copy the declaring code of Java's standard library, and in doing so infringed on the copyright by using it in their own platform.
Section F of the Oracle Binary Code License reads JAVA TECHNOLOGY RESTRICTIONS. You may not create, modify, or change the behavior of, or authorize your licensees to create, modify, or change the behavior of, classes, interfaces, or subpackages that are in any way identified as "java", "javax", "sun", “oracle” or similar convention as specified by Oracle in any naming convention designation.
tldr; Consider a painting created by an artist. A photographer comes along and thinks, "great painting!" and snaps a photo. If the photographer goes on to distribute and replicate the photograph of this painting (without an agreement with the artist) and earns a profit, the photographer has infringed on the artist's copyright.
Meaning it is (or was) not, at the time the issue arose.
Additionally, in a legal context it is "more complex" because the artist marketed these as vignettes of his Instagram feed. To prove copyright infringement, one would establish copyright ownership of the artist's feed. Who own's a particular user's Instagram feed -- the user, Instagram, or is it shared copyright of all entities listed within the feed? To enforce copyright the latter would need to be true since the artwork is marketed as part of a social media feed.