US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle [LWN.net]

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 5, 2021 15:55 UTC (Mon) by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
Parent article: US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

They got fair use and API's right and decided the case on that, because that was enough, pointing out that there's no need to rule on whether APIs would be copyrightable in the absence of fair use, because as a matter of law fair use makes them not copyrightable:

we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law

. and they run down the criteria: fair purpose, minimal copying in both absolute and relative terms, transformative use, no effect (in fact, they point out, on the record a positive effect) on the market for the protected work: Google's use was fair by every criterion. For my money the most consequential holding is this:

The record demonstrates numerous ways in which reimplementing an interface can further the development of computer programs. Google’s purpose was therefore consistent with that creative progress that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself

Which combined with the inescapable facts about APIs (which boil down to, they're not in any sense a substitute for the copyrighted work of which they're a tiny part) makes reimplementation a protected act not just because it's fair in the statutory sense but as an actual constitutional right.

to post comments

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 8:05 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link]

Reading the Syllabus of the ruling, the most convincing argument to me seems to be this:

Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. [...] As part of an interface, the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers. Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 9:11 UTC (Tue) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (3 responses)

because as a matter of law fair use makes them not copyrightable

Are you sure that interpretation is correct? As I understand it, material used under "fair use" is still considered to be under copyright - it's just that that particular use of that copyrighted material is allowed by the law anyway.

For example, I could quote 10 lines from a 1,000 line program in order to analyse it for educational purposes, and that would be "fair use". 100 different people could do that for distinct 10 line segments in a way that covered every line of the program, and they would all be covered by "fair use". But every single line of the program would still be under copyright, and making copies of the entire program for redistribution would still be a breach of copyright with the full force of the legal system behind it.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 20:11 UTC (Tue) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (2 responses)

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

[and not the prewritten code itself] so "nature of the work" will always point to fair use.

"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.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 7, 2021 1:23 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

"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.

No, that's not what it says. What it says is that fair use is an exception to the general rule that you aren't allowed to copy a work that's protected by copyright. Very importantly, the determination of fair use depends on the details of the derivative work, not the original work. One derivative work may make fair use of a copyrighted work and thus not be a violation of copyright, while a different derivative work may use the exact same part of the original but not be fair use.

To give a concrete example, consider one short scene from a movie. If a professor of film studies makes a lecture that uses that scene, that lecture may very well qualify as fair use. It is for non-profit educational use, it is transformative, it doesn't compete with the original work, and the excerpt is small in relation to the whole lecture. By all the prongs of the fair use test, it should qualify, and the copyright holder would likely lose if they sued the professor.

But now imagine if someone took the exact same scene from the movie, put a frame around it with some ads, and posted it to YouTube. It was done for profit, wasn't transformative, does compete with the original movie, and the excerpt is large in relation to the whole. A court would undoubtedly rule the use was infringing. That would be true even if the same court had ruled in favor of the film professor. Finding that one use didn't infringe doesn't invalidate the copyright; it just says that specific use was allowed.

In this case, the court ruled that Google's use didn't infringe. That doesn't touch on the deeper issue of whether the files Google copied could have been copyrighted in the first place. It's possible that header files, by themselves, are not sufficiently expressive to be copyrightable. A lot of people have been pushing for the courts to rule exactly that. The ruling in this case hints in that direction, but it doesn't say it outright. As of today, those files are still under copyright, and Oracle could sue the next company that tries to copy them.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 8, 2021 4:16 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Indeed, fair use is evaluated in each use. It has no bearing on the copyright itself. You could maybe construct some where case where most uses of a copyrighted work would be permitted, or more narrowly most expected uses, but that does not make the work any less copyrighted, just it may limit the practical power of it regarding restricting use.