{"id":30411,"date":"2020-10-09T15:13:01","date_gmt":"2020-10-09T19:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30411"},"modified":"2020-10-09T15:13:01","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T19:13:01","slug":"google-v-oracle-at-supreme-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/09\/google-v-oracle-at-supreme-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Google v. Oracle at Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

Timothy B. Lee<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court’s eight justices on Wednesday seemed skeptical of Google’s argument that application programming interfaces (APIs) are not protected by copyright law. The high court was hearing oral arguments in Google’s decade-long legal battle<\/a> with Oracle. Oracle argues that Google infringed its copyright in the Java programming language when it re-implemented Java APIs for use by Android app developers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My gut feeling is that Google is in the right here — APIs should not be copyrightable — but that they utterly failed to make the argument in a clear way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

See also: Miguel de Icaza<\/a>, Florian<\/a> Mueller<\/a> (3<\/a>, 4<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n

Charles Duan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nReaders of this site no doubt know that Oracle’s arguments in its lawsuit against Google, set to be argued in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, could spell disaster<\/a> for the computer industry, by turning the act of reimplementing an API into copyright infringement. Back in January, I revealed in an Ars Technica<\/a> piece that it could even spell disaster for Oracle itself, because Oracle’s cloud storage service reimplements Amazon’s S3 API. Oracle did not dispute my findings but shrugged them off, claiming Amazon had granted permission. I was skeptical, but at the time did not have hard evidence to prove a negative that Oracle had no license.<\/p>

I’ve now found the evidence for why Oracle should be worried. And more importantly, it shows why every tech company and startup should be worried about the Google v. Oracle<\/em> case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n