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The SCOTUS already denied cert on the question of copyrightability. The question now is whether it's fair use.
by icebraining 7y ago
The SCOTUS already denied cert on the question of copyrightability. The question now is whether it's fair use.
- bitwize 7y agoIt isn't fair use. Fair use under U.S. law refers to excerpting a copyrighted work for certain purposes including news reporting, research, scholarship, criticism, and parody. If Google copied the APIs without any of these uses in mind (almost a certainty in the case of Android), they infringed on Oracle's copyright. Period.
- icebraining 7y agoThe test doesn't include any such list of purposes. That said, yeah, it's probably not fair use.
- bitwize 7y ago17 U.S.C. §107 does include a list of purposes which, while not exhaustive, is intended to show the sort of things which constitute fair use -- things which Android's use of Java code is far removed from.
- wtallis 7y agoThat isn't too surprising, given that functional compatibility really isn't the kind of thing you would expect a copyright law to discuss. If copyright is being stretched to cover this new realm, then it also needs to be assessed for what should qualify as fair use in this realm.