Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected By Copyright

Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by ubernostrum on Thursday May 31, 2012 @07:50PM (#4051080)

There is still some debate -- and this case didn't touch it -- over linking and derivative works. Static linking pretty clearly involves something that requires a license from the copyright holder, but dynamic linking is far from clear. The GPL basically asserts that dynamic linking makes a derivative work, but there's no guarantee that this is how copyright law would actually be interpreted by a court.

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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by caf on Thursday May 31, 2012 @09:34PM (#4051443)

There is more to it than just the technical nature of the linking, though - the court would take into account all of the circumstances of the claimed infringement.

For example, if you distributed your commercial software packaged up with a GPL library, with scripts or links or whatever designed to have that library loaded together with the commercial binary as part of a finished product, then the "dynamic" nature of the linking might well be considered to be a technical irrelevancy.

On the other hand, if you distributed your commercial binary on it's own, and expected your customers to find a compatible library to dynamically link against it, then that might be a different matter.

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Re:Oracle v. Google - Judge Alsup Rules APIs Not Protected B... by ubernostrum on Thursday May 31, 2012 @10:55PM (#4051708)

The second case is the more common one, and has come up a few times. See, for example, debates over whether code written to a generic readline-esque API must comply with readline's GPL, even though non-GPL alternatives are available.

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