According to the BBC, Google has been found "guilty" of infringing copyright in Oracle's Java APIs. The BBC piece is so woefully short on detail that it's hard to discern what has actually been held, but it doesn't sound promising for Google...
According to the Wall Street Journal:
"The jury decided Google did make use of Oracle's Java interfaces, but
was unable to reach a decision on whether that was protected under the
so-called fair-use doctrine."
It would seem to throw even more questions over whether an API is protectable as a copyright work or not — Google's argument seems to be that the interfaces were not covered by copyright, which was not accepted by the jury (although I'd be surprised if a jury decided a question of law, rather than fact).
Depending on what was actually held, it will be interesting to see how this correlates with EU jurisprudence, given directive 2009/24/EC — whether it will be safer to develop software within Europe than in the US!
No comments:
Post a Comment