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The wordpress argument is about the question if a court would see a plugin as an independent work, or as an modification of wordpress. Copyright law allows for
by belorn 8y ago
The wordpress argument is about the question if a court would see a plugin as an independent work, or as an modification of wordpress. Copyright law allows for independent works to interface with each other without permission from both authors, but do not allow modification of a work without permission.
The distinction between a modification and a interface is an interesting legally gray area, but it is not relevant to the claim that Oracle is making. They say that the interface itself in Java was artistically made and thus made the header files copyright-able. If the courts agree with Oracle then it makes it impossible to write software that have compatible interface, since it is (almost) impossible to do so without creating copies the interface.
- wtallis 8y agoIs there anything in the Federal Circuit's ruling that restricts the consequences of API copyright to independent implementations of APIs, and ensures that consumers/users of the same APIs are not treated as derivative works of the API?
- belorn 8y agoNot that I know of, but in general the idea of independent implementations of a compatible API is practically impossible. In order to be compatible it need to match, and while you can make a independent implementation of the libraries you will still need to copy the API definitions in order to be compatible. That is the part that Oracle sued for.