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Showing posts with the label Intellectual property law

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 ...