Over the past decade, Google and Oracle have been waging a high stakes copyright battle.
Here’s the pickle: Google used 11.5k lines of code from Oracle’s Java platform to build its mobile operating system (Android).
Android now runs 2B+ phones and Oracle sought as much as $9B in damages, per The Wall Street Journal.
Here’s what happened:
In the case of APIs, not so much.
A number of startup companies — and even Google’s frenemy Microsoft — supported the search giant’s case.
The reason is that APIs are:
… concerned that the ruling could mean overly lax fair use applications of their content.
Per the Journal, the Supreme Court kept its ruling quite narrow and was focused specifically on Google’s use of Java for Android, deciding it only took “what was needed” (Google copied 0.4% of Java’s ~2.9m lines of code).
Furthermore, the court did not decide on whether APIs should be copyrighted at all, “given the rapidly changing technological, economic, and business-related circumstances.”
Solving for this equilibrium means we’ll likely see many more of these types of code/API lawsuits in the future.