The U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling concerning the ongoing legal dispute 'Oracle vs. Google,' which has persisted since 2010 regarding the use of Java APIs in the Android platform. The high court sided with Google, determining that the use of Java APIs constitutes fair use.
The court agreed that Google's objective was to create a different system focused on solving problems for a new computing environment (smartphones), and that the development of the Android platform helped achieve and popularize this goal. History shows that there are various ways in which the reimplementation of an interface can contribute to the further development of software. Google's intentions were aimed at fostering such creative progress, which is a primary purpose of copyright.
Google borrowed approximately 11,500 lines describing API structures, which constitutes only 0.4% of the entire API implementation totaling 2.86 million lines. Considering the volume and significance of the portion of code used, the 11,500 lines were regarded by the court as a small part of a significantly larger whole. Within the API, the copied lines are inextricably linked to other code (not owned by Oracle) that programmers utilize. Google copied the specific portion of code not for its excellence or functional advantages, but because it allowed programmers to leverage their existing skills in the new computing environment for smartphones.
It is worth recalling that in 2012, a judge with programming experience agreed with Google's position and ruled that the resulting API name tree is part of the command structure — a set of symbols associated with a specific function. Such a command set is interpreted under copyright law as not covered by copyright, as duplicating the command structure is a prerequisite for ensuring compatibility and portability. Therefore, the identity of strings with declarations and header descriptions of methods is irrelevant — to implement similar functionality, the resulting API function names must match, even if the functionality itself is implemented differently. Since there is only one way to express an idea or function, everyone is free to use identical declarations, and no one can monopolize such expressions.
Oracle appealed and succeeded in overturning the ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals — the appellate court recognized that the Java API is Oracle's intellectual property. After that, Google changed its strategy and tried to prove that the implementation of the Java API on the Android platform constitutes fair use, and this attempt was successful. Google's position was that creating portable software does not require a license for the API, and reproducing the API to create compatible functional analogs pertains to 'fair use.' According to Google, classifying the API as intellectual property would negatively impact the industry, as it undermines the development of innovation, and creating compatible functional analogs of software platforms could become the subject of lawsuits.
Oracle has appealed for the second time, and once again the case has been reviewed in its favor. The court ruled that the principle of "fair use" does not apply to Android, as this platform is developed by Google with profit motives achieved not through direct sales of the software product but through control over associated services and advertising. Google maintains control over users via a proprietary API for interacting with its services, which is prohibited for creating functional equivalents; that is, the use of the Java API is not limited to non-commercial applications. In response, Google submitted a petition to the higher court, and the U.S. Supreme Court returned to examine the question of whether application programming interfaces (APIs) fall under intellectual property and issued a final decision in favor of Google.
Source: opennet.ru
