Oracle vs Google is Much Bigger than Android APIs
Oracle, which acquired Sun in 2010, is waging patent warfare against Google. The claim is that Android illegally makes (and now apparently no longer does) use of several Java patents, and because of that Oracle deserves a stake of the widely-used and equally profitable mobile platform.
Initially it was about the billions of dollars in compensation plus the royalties Larry Ellison’s company demanded – that would’ve been a devastating blow to the Android ecosystem. But the judge in charge of the case wasn’t exactly sympathetic to that many zeros and moved the decimal point quite a ways to the left.
Today however, it’s about the APIs, and more importantly the precedent this legal battle sets for the entire tech community. One of the things Judge William Alsup will determine is whether or not Google infringed Oracle’s copyright by using the Java APIs. Eric Schmidt says that his company used different implementations of the interfaces but didn’t bother to change their existing names, and it seems now that the fate of the internet hangs by this argument.
As of today programming interfaces are not technically copyrightable, and programmers are using APIs developed by third party companies without explicitly asking for permission. Even Linux does it. But if Alsup decides that an API is indeed the legal property of its owner, in this case Oracle, then all of the apps that fall under the same category as Google could be subjected to the same treatment.
“If APIs can be copy-protected, that would be incredibly destructive to the internet as a whole for so many different reasons,” says George Reese, Chief Technology Officer with enStratus Networks, a seller of cloud management services. “But with respect to cloud, in particular, it would put any company that has implemented the Amazon APIs at risk unless they have some kind of agreement with Amazon on those APIs.”
Amazon is everywhere these days, even the daily deals scene. More importantly however it operates the single most popular cloud hosting platform out there, and that makes it more than just a particularly good example of what could come out of this trial.
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