US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Not quite; the court made no decision about whether or not the code in question is copyrightable, merely that fair use would cover the alleged infringements, and thus there's no reason to think about whether or not the code is copyrightable, because either it is, but fair use means no infringement, or it isn't and thus copyright cannot be infringed by Google's actions. Either way round, the result is that Google has obeyed the law.

The fair use test is actually a complex one. It's not a simple question of whether the copying falls into a bucket of allowed conduct. Instead, the court is supposed to consider multiple factors and decide how they balance each other. Those factors include:

• The amount of copying, both absolute and relative to the whole work
• How it's being used, i.e. commercial or non-profit
• Whether the copied work is likely to compete with the original
• Whether the copying is transformative

In this case, the amount of copying is small, both in absolute amount and relative to the total size of the project, it's used commercially, the court determined it's not likely to compete with the original, and the use was considered to be transformative. Based on that, the court decided it was fair use. But they easily could have decided otherwise if they felt it was likely to compete with Java. I'm not sure the decision was correct- I think it really is competing with Java- but deciding on fair use let the court sidestep the question of whether the code was copyrightable at all.

I'm not sure. I believe there's a sound argument in support, so I posted, that is about as sure as I get on this stuff, but I don't play in the same league as supreme court justices, so me thinking my argument's sound doesn't make me feel any too very sure, no.

"the fair use of a copyrighted work […] is not an infringement of copyright." means—it flat out says—that copyright does not cover fair use. Remember that §107 was codifying centuries of common-law precedent, cases judges saying ~no, copyright doesn't cover that (or does), go away~. The justices walked through every factor they could find that would weigh on whether Google's use was fair (as they point out, the statutory factors are noted but not exclusive), and in Google's use they all came out in Google's favor. So *this* case is basically the poster child for a fair-use slam dunk. Copyright authority cannot be extended to interfere with fair use. Pointing out that copyright covers, that holders are still granted the authority to prohibit and get the state to enforce penalties for, unfair use, doesn't have any bearing on whether it covers fair use: it doesn't. It can't. That's beyond the time-honored and now statutory limit of copyright ablility.

So the question that remains is whether reimplementing API's is going to *necessarily* be fair use. In any real use, I think so.

For starters, as the opinion spends some effort elaborating, it's incorrect in this context to regard the entries in an index as some sort of independently-copyrighted work. What Google copied was 0.004 of the only clearly copyrightable work in evidence. I dare say that shouldn't surprise anyone here, I wouldn't expect anyone here to credit any notion of a market for some "Java API header-files-equivalent" work, nor the equivalent argument that there's some plausible transaction where having just the headers would be any viable substitute for an entire original work. I think they pretty much put paid to the silliness of the "but they copied all of what they copied!"-vuvuzela-blowing cohort. Substantiality will necessarily favor reimplementers.

They got API's right:

The nature of the work at issue favors fair use. The copied lines of code are part of a “user interface” that provides a way for programmers to access prewritten computer code through the use of simple commands

"purpose and character" won't necessarily do that. Google's use clearly does, as does say WINE's. I think it's good that cases are decided on the facts before them, and that courts don't spend time adjudicating cases that don't actually arise. So I really don't care about the contrived ten-lines-at-a-time effort. The law isn't about imagining every conceivable bad behavior and launching preemptive strikes, because there'd be no end. It's enough to deal with behaviors people actually engage in, eagerly anticipating more is just borrowing trouble, wasted effort.

So of the four statutory factors, three (substantiality, nature, market effect) will always land squarely in fair use territory, and "purpose and character" would only be troubling when considering a direct competitor with some clearly detrimental tendencies. I'm having trouble imagining such a thing, implementation is A Lot Of Work; and remember that IBM got hit with anti-trust for trying to conceal their interfaces (this was before copyright was codified), copyright is a created artifice, instituted to promote progress, not to entitle permanent possession.