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I fully expect the Supreme Court to rule as narrowly as they can on this case. As others have pointed out, to rule otherwise could potentially disrupt the entir

I fully expect the Supreme Court to rule as narrowly as they can on this case. As others have pointed out, to rule otherwise could potentially disrupt the entire software industry. "Alternatively, the Supreme Court could hold that software interfaces are sometimes eligible for copyrights but that Google's copying falls under the fair use doctrine. This would save Google from writing Oracle a 10-figure check, but it could still drag the software industry into a legal quagmire."

gpm 7y ago
I'm hoping for a ruling that can be basically summed up as "The merger doctrine is evaluated at the time the copying takes place, therefore we reverse the federal circuit and don't have to decide the rest of this nonsense". Explanation: The merger doctrine is the doctrine that if there is only one way to write something it isn't copyrightable/copyright infringement. Alsup (the original judge) interpreted this as being interpreted at the time Google copied the API, at which point in time there was only one way to write an API compatible with existing java programs, thereby killing Oracle's case. The federal circuit reversed based on the idea that it should be interpreted at the time of the creation of the copyrighted work, at which time there was no reason to favor calling something "java.lang.String" instead of "java.std.String" and so on. Fair use is a lot more complicated to deal with than the merger doctrine. Ruling based on it will almost certainly result in a lot more pointless court cases as people debate whether or not this instance is fair use.