Re:Google files opening Supreme Court brief in Oracle v. Goo...
by sangnoir on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @12:31PM
(#21982192)
Actual copying is important, but not in this particular lawsuit.
Oracle is claiming that the organization of constants/methods in packages as well as the method signatures are copyrighted - they are arguing that it doesn't matter if you have a clean room implementation of BufferedInputReader() if you put it in java.io (like Oracle's JRE) and gave it the same signature as Oracle did, then you're infringing on their copyright.
If this SCOTUS broadly rules in Oracles favor, this would kill many projects, including WINE (which implements Microsoft's Win32 API without copying)
Oracle is claiming that the organization of constants/methods in packages as well as the method signatures are copyrighted - they are arguing that it doesn't matter if you have a clean room implementation of BufferedInputReader() if you put it in java.io (like Oracle's JRE) and gave it the same signature as Oracle did, then you're infringing on their copyright.
If this SCOTUS broadly rules in Oracles favor, this would kill many projects, including WINE (which implements Microsoft's Win32 API without copying)