home << Policy << auto supreme court asks white house to weigh in on copyrightability of apis
Thu, 02 May 2019
Supreme Court Asks White House To Weigh In On Copyrightability Of APIs
Furnished content.
Back during an earlier round of the never-ending legal dispute between Oracle and Google concerning whether or not APIs can be covered by copyright the Supreme Court requested that the White House weigh in on its opinion -- leading then Solicitor General Donald Verrilli (formerly a top lawyer for the MPAA) to weigh in with what we argued was a painfully clueless brief. The underlying issue here, from the very beginning, revolves almost entirely around the simple point: do you actually understand what an API is? If you do -- and recognize that it's fundamentally different from executing software code -- then this is an easy case. An API is simply an instruction set -- a recipe of sorts -- for being able to interface with a particular program. And US copyright law is clear that copyright cannot apply to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery."An API is easily covered by that designation, but because you have non-technical lawyers who can't understand the difference between software operating code (which is copyrightable) and an API (which is not) they argue that the two are virtually identical, and thus APIs should be covered by copyright. Tragically, that argument worked at the appeals court (it didn't work at the district court, where Judge Alsup already had some coding history and famously taught himself how to program in Java to better understand the facts of the case).Now that the case is back on appeal to the Supreme Court, looking specifically at questions of fair use around the reuse of an API, the Supreme Court has (somewhat oddly) asked the White House to weigh in again. As part of its Monday orders it invited the White House to give its opinion on whether or not it should even hear the case (not yet on the actual merits of either side's case):The Solicitor General is invited to file a brief in thiscase expressing the views of the United States. Of course, there's a very different White House with a very different Solicitor General. Of course, I have no idea if the current Solicitor General's office knows anything about coding or knows why an API is not operating code, and it seems like a total crapshoot to expect the Solicitor General to have an informed opinion on this matter. So it's not entirely clear why the Supreme Court expects it will -- but now that it's asked, we should probably expect something from the White House on this issue. As has been noted in the past, when the Supreme Court does ask the Solicitor General to weigh in, it often has an impact on the case -- especially when the question is simply on whether or not the Supreme Court should hear the case in the first place. Given that, one hopes that the Solicitor General will support the petition to hear the case and revisit the CAFC's ongoing confusion over copyright law.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
Read more here
posted at: 12:00am on 02-May-2019
path: /Policy | permalink
comment...
home << Policy << auto supreme court asks white house to weigh in on copyrightability of apis
|
|