Google vs. Oracle

[Erel]

Google beats Oracle in biggest programming copyright Supreme Court case ever

At long last, programming code's application programming interfaces are protected from Oracle's over-reaching claims.

www.zdnet.com

This was a big threat on Android 10 years ago.

 

[Pendrush]

This was a big threat on Android 10 years ago.

Not just Android, but every API usage by every programmer in the world.

 

[Hamied Abou Hulaikah]

WOW, I was following this case news for a while ...

In this case oracle tried to squeeze Google $9B for copying 11k lines of Java API-like code!!
But court decided: APIs can't be strictly copyrighted

This decision makes programmers more saver worldwide, including our love B4X.

 

[agraham]

But court decided: APIs can't be strictly copyrighted

Actually they ducked this wider decision (for several pragmatic reasons) and decided on a narrow decision to only settle this case. The decision as I understand it was that even if APIs could be copyrighted then Google's use was fair use under copyright law and was so permissible.

 

[aeric]

According to Oracle, Google's APIs had violated Oracle Java copyright because they had duplicated Java APIs' "structure, sequence, and organization."

Just need to rename or refactoring the functions, insert some random code in between, jumble up the sequence a bit and add in some spaghetti will make the lines not look duplicated.

 

[agraham]

Just need to rename or refactoring the functions,

It's not the same API if you do that. The whole point is compatibility between implementations which means same function names, same parameter lists, same return types.