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According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may
by extension 15y ago
According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may very well be beautiful and unique, but are they really suggesting that Google cloned Java merely because they didn't want to take the time to come up with their own API and not because they wanted to interoperate with existing Java code and tools? Oracle points out that Google's Java is not 100% compatible, but so what? It's still compatible with a large subset of Java, and a large subset of tools and libraries do, in fact, work with Android unmodified.
Is there not some aspect of copyright law that prevents these sorts of doomsday abuse scenarios e.g. someone copyrights the sound of breathing and we all choke to death? It seems to me that the extreme collatoral damage that would be caused by copyrightable APIs is, in itself, a silver bullet argument against it.