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Google v. Oracle

  Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have on earlier occasion covered the very slow march through the court system of a monster of an intellectual property case, the dispute over the legality of Google's use of Java interfaces in its Android coding. But to review: years ago Oracle bought Sun, the company whose engineers had created the Java programming language, on which various APIs (application programming interfaces) have in turn been built.  The dispute is a matter of copyright, not of patents. And early on in this litigation, Google took the position that there is no copyrightable interest in APIs. The Federal Circuit held against that view, and remanded to the trial courts for consideration of whether Google use is "fair use" under copyright doctrine, or unfair and thus infringing use. The Supreme Court, in 2015, declined to hear an appeal from the Federal Circuit, so Google resigned itself to fighting that battle in the trenches of a trial.  The jury ...

Copyright and Design

Returning to the issue of the interface of copyright and design patents, which I discussed here on May 12: In the course of my research for an upcoming book review, I've gone as I sometimes do beyond the 'four corners' of the book and have read the following blog post, from Pamela Samuelson: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2017/05/overlapping-protecting-innovations.html That entry, posted almost precisely a year ago now, contends that in the specific field of application program interface (API) there isn't any significant overlap between the two sorts of IP protection. That position puts Ms Samuelson (portrayed here, a professor at Berkeley Law) at odds with the Federal Circuit, which recently (in ORACLE v. GOOGLE) said precisely the opposite.