US Supreme Court Google's request for a transfer of a pleading litigation "Oracle v Google" in the highest instance. Last year, the US Federal Court of Appeals Oracle's appeal and reconsidered a 2016 ruling in favor of Google regarding the use of the Java API in the Android platform. In response to Google's petition, the US Supreme Court agreed to review the case file and revisit the question of whether APIs are intellectual property.
Recall that in 2012 a judge with programming experience, with the position of Google and that the name tree that forms the API is part of a command structure, a set of characters associated with a particular function. Such a set of commands is treated by copyright law as not subject to copyright, since duplication of the command structure is an indispensable condition for ensuring compatibility and portability. Therefore, the identity of lines with declarations and header descriptions of methods does not matter - to implement similar functionality, the names of the functions that form the API 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 filed an appeal and won in the US Federal Court of Appeals - The Court of Appeal recognized that the Java API is the intellectual property of Oracle. After that, Google changed tactics and tried to prove that the implementation of the Java API in the Android platform is fair use, and this attempt . Google's position was that creating portable software does not require an API license, and repeating the API to create interoperable functional counterparts is "fair use". According to Google, classifying APIs as intellectual property will negatively affect the industry, as it undermines the development of innovation, and the creation of interoperable functional analogues of software platforms may become the subject of lawsuits.
Oracle filed an appeal for the second time and again the case was in her favor. The court ruled that the principle of “fair use” does not apply to Android, since this platform is being developed by Google for selfish purposes, realized not through the direct sale of a software product, but through control over related services and advertising. At the same time, Google retains control over users through a proprietary API for interacting with its services, which is prohibited from being used to create functional analogues, i.e. the use of the Java API is not limited to non-commercial use.
Source: opennet.ru