U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Oracle API Case

Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by wtallis on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @01:04AM (#9803051)

> "The concrete Java declarations that make up an API are a protectable work of authorship. The abstract operations they describe are not."

Oracle was claiming rights to the "structure, sequence, and organization" of the APIs, not the text of their declarations. They were unmistakably going after something that was at least in some way more abstract and broad than the text of the declarations.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by rayiner on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @01:50AM (#9803170)

I'm not embracing the full extent of Oracle's argument in the case, I'm giving my own take on the issue.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by wtallis on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @02:00AM (#9803216)

Fair enough. But do you stand by your assertion that something more abstract than literal header file text can be deserving of copyright but ABIs shouldn't? I'd like to know how near or far your line is from Oracle's, if only to have an example of where else the line could be drawn.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by rayiner on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @08:27AM (#9804671)

Yes, but that's the usual copyright rule isn't it? You can't get around copyright by search and replacing "Harry Potter" with "Barry Potter." And it's well understood that the less creative the expression, the less has to be different for a work not to infringe. I'd say changing a couple of parameter names wouldn't do it, but changing the syntax of the declarations surely would.

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