Surprising ways code-copying meets 'fair use' threshold
Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2021 10:10 am
It's amazing how many reports on this story have the phrase 'Google stole Oracle's code.'
The technical aspects of this case have been misconstrued because it's hard for the public to understand it. Google did not 'steal code'. All they did was use standard API labels from Java in order to maintain a standard.
For non techies, this is as if Google used the table of contents from Oracle's 'book', but the the rest of Google's 'book' was a new work. The reason you do this is for compatibility. So everyone who reads the new 'book' understands how to compare each chapter in the two books. Yeah, okay, oversimplification, but that's it in a nutshell. All Google used was Java's framework for API calls, not the actual code. The Supreme Court did the right thing from a technical standpoint. I can't speak to the legal consequences for other works. I'll leave that to copyright lawyers
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/ ... -threshold
The technical aspects of this case have been misconstrued because it's hard for the public to understand it. Google did not 'steal code'. All they did was use standard API labels from Java in order to maintain a standard.
For non techies, this is as if Google used the table of contents from Oracle's 'book', but the the rest of Google's 'book' was a new work. The reason you do this is for compatibility. So everyone who reads the new 'book' understands how to compare each chapter in the two books. Yeah, okay, oversimplification, but that's it in a nutshell. All Google used was Java's framework for API calls, not the actual code. The Supreme Court did the right thing from a technical standpoint. I can't speak to the legal consequences for other works. I'll leave that to copyright lawyers
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/ ... -threshold