Communications of the ACM

Vviewpoints

Legally Speaking
Copyrightability of
Java APIs Revisited
A recent case challenges the long-standing view that application
program interfaces are not protectable under copyright law.

rights in Java, which shows it knew it needed a license.

When these negotiations failed, Google went ahead and copied 37 of the Java APIs anyway in the Android platform for mobile devices. Tens of thousands of Java programmers have written apps to run on the Android platform. These apps have contributed to the extraordinary success of Android devices.

Shortly after acquiring Sun and its assets, Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement. (There were originally some patent claims in the case as well, but a jury ruled against those claims.) Oracle relied on some judicial precedents that had held the SSO of programs is protectable by copyright law as long as there are multiple ways to design that SSO.

Section 102(b)

At issue in the Oracle case is the proper interpretation of Section 102(b) of U.S. copyright law. It states “[i]n no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle or

FOR MORE THAN 20 years, the prevailingviewhasbeenthat application program inter- faces (APIs) are unprotect- able elements of copyrighted computer programs. According to this view, programmers are free to reimplement other firms’ APIs in independently written code. Competition and innovation in the software industry has thrived amazingly well in part because of rulings upholding this understanding.

Challenging this view is the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit (CAFC) May 2014 decision in Oracle v. Google. The CAFC held that the “ structure, sequence, and organization” (SSO) of the Java APIs that Google reimplemented in its Android software are protectable expression under copyright law. It reversed a lower court ruling that the Java APIs were not copyrightable.

Google has asked the U.S. Supreme
Court to review the CAFC’s ruling. Sev-
eral amicus curiae (friend of the court)
briefs have been filed in support of this
effort. Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, and
Yahoo! are among these amici (as am I
and 77 computer scientists).

The Supreme Court may take the case because the CAFC’s decision is in conflict with other appellate court rulings that exclude APIs from copyright protection. This column will explain the Oracle and Google theories about the copyrightability of Java APIs and the precedents on which each relies. The stakes in this case could not be higher.

Oracle’s Claims

Developing Java APIs required considerable creativity. Sun’s engineers had substantial freedom in the choices they made about how to structure the APIs. The Java APIs are thus easily original enough to qualify for copyright protection, says Oracle (which acquired the intellectual property (IP) rights in Java when it acquired Sun Microsystems).

Java has achieved considerable success, which is why Google wanted to use Java APIs in its software platform for mobile devices. Google entered into negotiations with Sun about licensing