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- SUPREME COURT WON’T HEAR GOOGLE’S APPEAL IN JAVA API CASE
Supreme Court won’t hear Google’s appeal in Java API case
- By Joel Hruska on June 29, 2015 at 2:33 pm
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The Supreme Court declined today to hear Google’s appeal in its long-running spat with Oracle over Java APIs and copyright, in a move that could have significant ramifications for the entire software industry. When the case went to trial several years ago, Google won an initially favorable verdict, which ruled that APIs couldn’t be copyrighted because they were held to be functional elements of code rather than expressive statements of individual creativity or particular intent. The original case covered Google’s use of names, declarations, and header lines in the Java APIs, which Oracle declared constituted a breach of its copyright. Certain purely functional elements of organization, like using alphabetical order to create a dictionary or phone book, can’t be copyrighted, which is why the case was so important: Do the headers and structure of an API constitute a creative element, or are they purely a functional method of organization?
Some of the original jury questions. The first case found Google had not infringed and that APIs couldn’t be copyrighted, but was overturned
The ability to clone APIs to promote interoperability is generally thought to be extremely important for software ecosystems, which is why computer scientists had generally argued in favor of Google’s position. When the United States DOJ weighed in at the Supreme Court’s request earlier this year, however, it told the justices that it believed APIs should be protected by copyright. With the Supreme Court having declined to hear the case, it’ll head back to a lower district court for a ruling on whether or not Google’s use of the APIs constitutes fair use. Oracle is apparently seeking a $1 billion judgement against the company in the event that it is held to be infringing.
The fair use dilemma
In theory the courts could still decide in favor of Google, but fair use isn’t much of a standard to hang billions of dollars in revenue on. Copyright cases are typically decided on a case-by-case basis. Even if Google’s use of Java in this instance is ruled fair-use, there’s no guarantee that another case would be ruled in similar fashion. A broad declaration that APIs can’t be copyrighted, in contrast, provides additional protection for users and programmers.
How the district court rules, in this case, will be critical for establishing how much fair use wiggle room will exist in the future. The court will evaluate exactly what Google did (or failed to do) and hopefully give guidance on exactly how programmers in the future can look to the case in establishing whether or not their own API use infringes or not. Google has already begun pushing a replacement for its Java implementation (Dalvik), called ART, but would be on the hook for infringements on past devices and older iterations of Android.
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