Copyrightability of Java APIs Revisited.

The article looks at U.S. copyright law pertaining to the application program interfaces (APIs) of computer programs. The author discusses the 2014 U.S. Court of Appeals (Federal Circuit) ruling in the case Oracle v. Google which held that software company Oracle's APIs for the Java programming lang...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 58; no. 3; pp. 22 - 25
Main Author: Samuelson, Pamela
Format: Opinion
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Mar2015
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:The article looks at U.S. copyright law pertaining to the application program interfaces (APIs) of computer programs. The author discusses the 2014 U.S. Court of Appeals (Federal Circuit) ruling in the case Oracle v. Google which held that software company Oracle's APIs for the Java programming language are entitled to copyright protection, a decision which she says is contrary to numerous precedents in recent years. She says the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether to grant Internet firm Google's request to review the case and expresses support for Google on the grounds that copyright protection for APIs would damage the interoperability of programs and potentially generate much further litigation.