When the jury was only able to come up with a partial verdict this week in the copyright infringement case Oracle brought against Google, Oracle asked US district judge William Alsup to make a ruling but has received short shrift. The jury determined that Google’s use of Java API’s did infringe copyright but could not decide whether the use was within the bounds of ‘fair use’. In the absence of a decision on the crux of the issue – essentially whether API’s are copyrightable - Oracle responded by asking the judge make a ruling in its favour over the ‘fair use’ aspect. Alsup’s response was rapid and negative. We are not legal experts tuned to the nuance of every word but Alsup has just said APIs are not subject to copyright.
This week also saw an EU ruling in a case between SAS Institute and World Programming, which also determined that API’s could not be copyrighted.
The copyright decision will no doubt have repercussions within the context of the Oracle-Google lawsuit in terms of the liability issue, but there are certain to be wider industry implications.
A ruling in Oracle’s favour would have meant open source Java was a lot less open than it was believed to be which would impact Android and potentially deter developers of other software if they felt Oracle was watching for infringements.
Android is a special case in some ways – it is a non-standard implementation of Java. We can’t see Oracle trying to close out Java development (we believe it is after a slice of the Android market via additional license fees, see Google and Oracle head back to court) but it would raise questions and increase levels of caution. That would not be good news when much of the innovation in software is likely to come from cloud and mobile applications, which could also use ‘non-standard’ implementations.
The Oracle-Google lawsuit is still running. The copyright issue was the first of three trial portions. There is still the question of patents and damages.