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White House sides with Oracle, tells Supreme Court APIs are copyrightable

Posted by BernardSwiss on · 8 comments
Ars Technica; By David Kravets 		Mail this story
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The Justice Department is weighing in on the hot-button intellectual property dispute between Google and Oracle, telling the Supreme Court that APIs are protected by copyright.

The Obama administration's position means it is siding with Oracle and a federal appeals court that said application programming interfaces are subject to copyright protections. The high court in January asked for the government's views on the closely watched case.

The dispute centers on Google copying names, declarations, and header lines of the Java APIs in Android.

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Comments (8)

JaseP ·
Somebody had a great cartoon in the comments... captioned, "The STUPID,... It BURNS!!!"
seatex ·
The White House shouldn't be siding with anyone in a Supreme Court case. I wonder why??? Not really.
thenixedreport ·
They can freely give their opinion, but that's all they can do on that seeing as how they are a part of the executive branch. I'm going to bet at some point it either gets smacked down or both companies will simply come to an agreement.
BernardSwiss Story submitter ·
It's not really the Whitehouse, it's the Solicitor General -- Donald Verrilli, formerly the MPAA's top lawyer. Verrilli quite unsurprisingly ignored all the input from all the the people who actually knew anything, when he wrote up that statement..
JaseP ·
There it is,... My thanks to the_doctor.
skelband ·
I do wonder if Oracle are painting themselves into a corner by persisting in this strategy. Even a company like Oracle has to rely on a range of publicly available APIs. I'm sure they would be the first to change their minds if the boot was on the other foot. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the ODBC APIs are not of Oracle's construction. Didn't they originally come from Microsoft?

Making APIs copywriteable is one sort of mutually assured destruction in the software business, so why would anyone in their right minds want to pursue something like this?
gus3 ·
How long until the POSIX open(), read(), write(), and close() functions are copyrighted?

Further comment from me at this time will violate the TOS.

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