Supreme Court sides with developers in Google vs. Oracle

At least one legal scholar stated that the Google lawyer did an abysmal job presenting their case to the Supreme Court. Apparently it was enough though. Obviously people can only guess which way the court was inclined prior to arguments.

I believe so. Fair use allows that. If you were to try to hijack the APIs by extending them (in a proprietary way) then you'd possibly be open to litigation.

I'd agree that the court was right to dodge the issue of copyrightability by going for the most narrow interpretation, it's for the lower courts to decide.

Having said that, I think they shouldn't be copyrighted really, and the door is open for expensive litigation by larger companies shaking down smaller ones with this ruling.

As far as hijacking an API goes, well anyone is free to fork an MIT-licensed project, doesn't mean that it will gain traction.

Most of computing is built upon previous work so claiming originality in an API... well many more clever people than me have left their discoveries open to the public, and I suspect that any API originality doesn't measure up well against their work :)

Nothing is fair use until a judge rules as such in a court of law. So to answer your question: Probably, but it would have to be litigated.

This!

The hardest thing for competing chip manufacturers to overcome in the deep learning world with is the CUDA APIs / CuDNN API etc.

Basically read Thomas' dissent.

1.) The Court skirted the issue of whether APIs are copyrightable. If they were, it would be bad, but it's unclear if they aren't copyrightable as a matter of the law as written.

2.) The majority held on the basis of fair use and, as Thomas argues, that's arguably a stretch--and certainly a very fact-dependent one.

The amount of code google copied was a bit much. The SC didn't rule that this wasn't a copyright violation but instead that "this qualifies as fair use" which means that it doesn't really resolve anything and leaves this sort of an issue open for future litigation.

That said, the down side of this is the old MS "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach is up for grabs by a large company. There isn't much stopping someone from making "not java" and breaking it in subtle ways (Imagine, for example, if android's dalvik/art became a common runtime for Java apps. Or more realistically, what microsoft did with Java back in the sun days).

The good thing is that for now, just implementing interfaces likely is just fair use. The bad thing is you are allow to implement a LOT of interfaces before the copyright question comes up again.

I think it’s really interesting. On one hand interoperability is huge and the code copied didn’t actually do anything. On the other hand the most important part of an api is its design and that’s where a lot of thought, skill, and experience is needed.

I think Oracle's case was incredibly full of merit, and an incredible PR campaign was run by Google to ensure nobody believed it. The idea that the whole of the software industry was under threat if Google wasn't able to wholesale violate Oracle's license terms for Java is absolutely laughable, but it's nearly a commonly held belief in the industry, propped up largely by organizations Google's Public Policy team has donated large sums to.

Bear in mind, Google's internal correspondence covered knowing they needed to license Java, negotiating terms to license Java, and then when they didn't want to comply with Oracle's terms (which were literally: interoperability, because they wanted Android to run standard cross-platform Java apps), they chose to steal what they wanted instead. Andy Rubin (of "Larry Page gave me $90 million after I sexually harassed subordinates" fame) had a major bonus tied to launching Android on time, and just taking what he needed was the solution.

Also, if Android had been GPL-licensed, they could've built on OpenJDK from the get-go legitimately, but again, stealing was preferable in Google's case to obeying license terms, because they wanted to appeal to manufacturer's pushing proprietary code.

Oracle is not a hero, but Google was fighting against interoperability and open source licensing the entire way, and bought their way into public opinion.

It was 7:2, not 5:4.