Oracle wins Android-Java copyright appeal

Note that the article was written by Florian Mueller, who is on the Oracle payroll.

The appeals court argument seems reasonable, if applied in a more typical context of creative end user content. Mickey Mouse is copyrightable because he's not just any old mouse, but rather a specific one.

But as for API's? Although Sun might have had choices, there is no a priori added value derived from the specific choices they did make, other than the fact that they have become standardized, so engineers are used to working with them.

Mickey is Mickey because the specific qualities Disney gave him, in and of itself makes him rather more interesting than some randomly chosen rodent. Which language API's, as even the court (or the article author, I'm unclear) acknowledges, generally are not.

Appellate court decision: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/...

The appeals court looked to a decades-old "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test. In essence, that test requires the judge and jury to play the role of a patent examiner. See slip opinion at pages 23, 40. The expense and uncertainty aren't much fun for either party (or for the judge, jury, and law clerks for that matter). But yippee, say the IP litigators, because cases like this require lots of billable hours.

There's an important procedural aspect to this that I haven't seen mentioned yet. This was appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, not the 9th Circuit which is where copyright cases from the 9th Circuit would normally go.

I believe that it ended up in the CAFC because it was also a patents case, and CAFC handles all patent appeals from the Federal district courts.

This is significant because CAFC sets precedent for all circuits. If there had been no patent case, so that the appeal would have went to the 9th Circuit instead of the CAFC, then it would only set precedent for the 9th Circuit. The Courts of Appeal in the other circuits might decide similar API copyright cases differently, and then there would be a good chance the Supreme Court would take up the issue to resolve the differences between the different circuits.

The Supreme Court can, of course, still take up this issue, but they are much more likely to take a case if there is split among the circuits. Here's the Court's statement on this [1]:

    Review on a writ of certiorari is not a matter of
    right, but of judicial discretion. A petition for a
    writ of certiorari will be granted only for
    compelling reasons. The following, although neither
    controlling nor fully measuring the Court’s
    discretion, indicate the character of the reasons
    the Court considers:

    (a) a United States court of appeals has entered a
    decision in conflict with the decision of another
    United States court of appeals on the same important
    matter; has decided an important federal question in
    a way that conflicts with a decision by a state
    court of last resort; or has so far departed from
    the accepted and usual course of judicial
    proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a
    lower court, as to call for an exercise of this
    Court’s supervisory power;

    (b) a state court of last resort has decided an
    impor­ tant federal question in a way that
    conflicts with the decision of another state court
    of last resort or of a United States court of
    appeals;

    (c) a state court or a United States court of
    appeals has decided an important question of federal
    law that has not been, but should be, settled by
    this Court, or has decided an important federal
    question in a way that conflicts with relevant
    decisions of this Court.

    A petition for a writ of certiorari is rarely
    granted when the asserted error consists of
    erroneous factual findings or the misapplication of
    a properly stated rule of law.

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/ctrules/2010RulesoftheCourt.pdf

This is terrible news, one of the first decisions towards APIs being copyrightable.

So if Google had written a tiny portion of the Java API themselves then the whole debate would have been over?

There's something I can't fathom: Isn't Java supposed to have a Free Software incarnation? How could Google possibly infringe on it's API if it's the case?

Don't give Florian Mueller the pageviews.

I wonder what the implications might be to .NET? There's a large part of it's library that's pretty much lifted straight from Java - both the good and the bad. Flush with success might Oracle go after Microsoft next?

As we've seen with the recent patent case that reached the Supreme Court, once again because the Federal Court overturned the lower Court's ruling, it seems the Appeals Courts are a lot more inclined to be pro-patents, while the lower Courts (other than the East-Texas ones) and the Supreme Court aren't.

That being said, I hope this forces Google to deprecate Java on Android and start pushing developers to using Go. They should've been working on this since the trial with Oracle started, and not rest on their laurels.