General How the US Supreme Court saved the software industry from API copyrights

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Google and Oracle's argument before the Supreme Court last October left opponents of API copyrights extremely nervous. For the previous decade, Google had been arguing in lower courts that it didn't infringe copyright law when it re-implemented Java for use in Android. Google had lost—twice—at the appellate level.

Last October, justices for the nation's highest court seemed skeptical as well. Not only were they asking Google's lawyer, Tom Goldstein, a lot of tough questions, a number of them didn't seem to even understand what an API was. That seemed like a bad sign for Google because the distinction between code that declares an API and code that implements it was fundamental to Google's argument.

In an interview with Ars just after the oral argument, Cornell legal scholar James Grimmelman argued that Goldstein had botched the case.

"He did an abysmal job," Grimmelman told me. "At the level of nuance he was willing to get into, his case was a loser."

But Grimmelman now admits he was wrong. "I owe an apology to Tom Goldstein," he told me on Monday. "I had my criticisms of the job he did at oral argument, but he did a good enough job to win."

y a 6-2 vote, the nation's highest court held that Google's copying of Oracle's Java API was fair use. The ruling means Google won't have to pay billions of dollars in damages to Oracle. It also has huge implications for the broader software industry.

"It's a minor miracle we got an opinion that reached the right result with pretty sound reasoning despite not one of the justices being able to explain how an API works," Grimmelman said.


Read more here. (Ars Technica)


This article explains in depth on how the reasoning was made and the many nuances that come about on the decision-making by the Supreme Court.
 
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