Fair Use ... wins

 Fair Use:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• The nature of the copyrighted work;
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This directly applies to the victory Google won against Oracle regarding APIs (Application Programing Interface) as far use would now be moot if Oracle and the lawyers won vs the internet and interoperability of code that's changing how civilization does business on planet earth 24/7.

In a win for innovation, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that Google’s use of certain Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is a lawful fair use. In doing so, the Court reversed the previous rulings by the Federal Circuit and recognized that copyright only promotes innovation and creativity when it provides breathing room for those who are building on what has come before. 

This decision gives more legal certainty to software developers’ common practice of using, re-using, and re-implementing software interfaces written by others, a custom that underlies most of the internet and personal computing technologies we use every day.

Why this is important ...

To briefly summarize over ten years of litigation: Oracle claims a copyright on the Java APIs—essentially names and formats for calling computer functions—and claims that Google infringed that copyright by using (reimplementing) certain Java APIs in the Android OS. When it created Android, Google wrote its own set of basic functions similar to Java (its own implementing code). But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google used certain specifications of the Java APIs (sometimes called the “declaring code”). 

APIs provide a common language that lets programs talk to each other. They also let programmers operate with a familiar interface, even on a competitive platform. It would strike at the heart of innovation and collaboration to declare them copyrightable. 

What's sad about this is Sun Computer created Java, not Oracle. Oracle bought the code and tried to monetize it to the nth degree.

Fair Use rules, thank god.

Have to add this ...

Most importantly, in last October's oral argument, Justice Breyer was the most articulate defender of Google's position—sometimes explaining it more clearly than Google's own lawyer. Here's how I described Breyer's performance last fall:

"It's like the QWERTY keyboard," Breyer said in a question to Oracle's lawyer. "You didn't have to have a QWERTY keyboard on typewriters in the beginning. But my God, if you let somebody have a copyright on that now, they would control all typewriters, which really has nothing to do with copyright."

Just as a QWERTY copyright would lock typists into using a particular company's typewriters, Breyer suggested, a copyright to the Java APIs would lock programmers who have learned Java into using only Oracle-licensed Java implementations.

Exactly.