We proceed to some cases in which the court's concern is the interpretation of statutes. Copyright and Fair Use 18-956 Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. (04/05/2021) (supremecourt.gov) In intellectual property, this session will be remembered for its decision in the procedurally complicated Google v. Oracle. Even that name is resonant: it suggests a legal battle of corporate giants of King Kong versus Godzilla proportions. I wrote about this case in this blog in October, and I refer those readers who might want background to that discussion . It was obvious by the time the case was argued last fall that there were two ways Google could win: either it could convince the judges that application programming interfaces (APIs) were not copyrightable, OR it could persuade them that this use of the Java API (now owned by Oracle) is a fair use even if the copyright exists. At argument, Stephen Breyer made a fascinating observation. He compared the Java API...
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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 ...
Just an observation. One of the cutting edge fields in the tech world today is the sale of cloud services. Even big companies don't want to have to own their own servers if they don't have to. Amazon and Oracle both own a lot of servers, more than they need, so Amazon and Oracle in particular (other companies as well) long ago started letting other major companies -- such as the credit card giant Capital One, make use of their facility. Since companies like Amazon have to prepare for peak seasons, and most moments are by definition not "peak," they necessarily have a lot of capacity to sell most of the time. What began as an almost accidental sideline became an industry. This is the sort of service, by the way, that somebody is providing you whenever you say that you've stored certain data "in the cloud." I'm typing this on an HP Chromebook, which runs on google. Chromebook looks like a generic 'laptop' but its distinguishing feature ...