"I’m not a lawyer, but it’s my understanding that the Google v Oracle case established that APIs aren’t protected by copyright." I'm no lawyer either but I hav

"I’m not a lawyer, but it’s my understanding that the Google v Oracle case established that APIs aren’t protected by copyright." I'm no lawyer either but I have read the Supreme Court's decision in the case. It doesn't address whether APIs are protected by copyright. The Supreme Court generally makes the most limited ruling needed in order to resolve a case. In this case there were two issues at play. -Are API's copyrightable? -If so, was Google's use of the APIs fair use under copyright law as a jury had previously ruled? In order to make the most limited ruling needed to decide the case the Supreme Court first addressed the fair use question with an assumption that APIs could be copyrighted. The Court decided that Google's use did fall under fair use and so the case could be decided by the fair use question alone. They therefore didn't bother to address the question of whether APIs can be copyrighted. As it stands right now there is a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in the Oracle case that APIs are copyrightable which until the Supreme Court does address the issue means they are as far as the courts are concerned. Fair use is a case-by-case defense and the Supreme Court's decision doesn't mean that all use of an API is fair use. This is all very much still all up in the air and any use of the headers from the iOS SDK should be concerned about copyright issues.