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Comment by stephen82 | Hacker News Reader

This is not good...not good at all!

If Oracle wins, to me with zero knowledge around copyright laws and legalese topics, means small to medium companies will close down out of fear of getting sued for using or implementing a competitor's APIs.

Not only that, it feels like the whole technological "civilization" will collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating, because thousands of people will lose their job simply because companies will prefer to close down than go to court with huge companies the size of IBM, Amazon, Alphabet, and Oracle to name a few, and that thought alone lead to financial meltdown...as if we didn't have enough problems already with the pandemic!

If we continue like this, it would feel like living in "Minority Report", that we could get sued for simply thinking about implementing a competitor's API!

On the positive side, I'm quite curious to see where this could go.

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This is an overreaction.

We already are in the state you describe, except for patents. The doubly linked list is patented [0]. Selling something over the internet was patented [1]. The list could go on and on.

Every major software company has so many patents that they could find an infringement in almost any software company.

Why hasn't this happened? Because, like copyright, someone needs to actually bring suit. That doesn't happen that often. It happens more often with patents in the form of patent trolls actually, and there's no reason to believe api copyright suits would happen more often than patent suits... I think api copyright suits are actually going to be less lucrative and harder to prove on average.

So yeah, it seems like the current state of software patents is already far worse than APIs being copyrightable would be, and yet the sky is not falling, civilization is not collapsing, and business continues like usual.

[0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7028023B2/en

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5715314A/en

So why enable further madness when the current system is already dysfunctional?

I'm not arguing for oracle's case here. I'm not enabling the system to be more dysfunctional.

I'm merely responding to the parent's post that is interpreting a worst-case scenario that is vanishingly unlikely.

I'd appreciate if you didn't read into my comment an intent that isn't there. I am absolutely not arguing for "enabling further madness", and you asking a question that assumes I want that is not furthering this thread.

One question from a judge was that if “API is copyrightable” is bad, why didn’t we see sky falling in last 4 years since federal court decided so?

Because the vast majority of tech companies disagree with the law, and were probably expecting SCOTUS to overturn the case. When they realize that they're leaving money on the table, then we're going to see claims and counterclaims all over the place.

well it would be funny if amazon starts to sue oracle.

https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...

I mean even the freaking headers are the same which some could consider an implementation detail.

Oh yea, if Oracle wins Amazon is filing infringement claims against Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and probably others beside the very next day. Meanwhile MongoDB is going to sue Amazon for reimplementing their API. The real showstopper will be when IBM sues everyone who has ever implemented SQL support for a database. Copyright lasts 70 years past the life of the author, people would still be infringing on SQL to this very day!

actually that would be good for the market, since your courts really see, that the world is going down.

> One question from a judge was that if “API is copyrightable” is bad, why didn’t we see sky falling in last 4 years since federal court decided so?

Which was a fairly stupid question from a Supreme Court Justice, because you'd think that they know that decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on issues not within their special subject matter jurisdiction (which copyright is not) are not binding authority on any lower court, as the lower courts (and, in fact, the CAFC itself) are bound by the actual precedent of the regional circuit court (even trial courts in, in this case, the Ninth Circuit, whose law the CAFC notionally was applying in its Oracle v. Google decision, are not bound by the CAFC ruling, only by decisions actually issued by the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court.)

So there is currently no binding precedent applicable to any federal trial court that APIs are copyrightable, which is why the sky hasn't fallen.

You would think that, however much they might not understand APIs, Supreme Court Justices would be intimitately familiar with the appellate structure of the US federal courts.

> it feels like the whole technological "civilization" will collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating

Well, the decision is binding on the US only so this is an exaggeration.

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