A US appeals court on Friday breathed new life into Oracle’s big-money lawsuit against Google by ruling that software commands can be copyrighted just like books.
The case stems from 2012 trial, in which Oracle claimed that Google owed them billions in damages for using parts of the Java programming language in its Android smartphone operating system.
The case is being closely watched in Silicon Valley, where some champions of Internet freedom worry that extending copyright protection to these bits of code, called application programming interfaces (APIs) would threaten innovation.
A panel of three judges in the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court in 2012 erred and that it is bound to afford APIs protection under copyright laws “until either the Supreme Court or Congress tells us otherwise.”
“We’re disappointed — and worried,” the digital-rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a blog post about the appeals court decision. “The implications of this decision are significant and dangerous.”
The EFF and other groups worry the decision could herald an explosion in legal battles over software spreading to copyrights in how code is written.
In the 2012 trial before US District Court Judge William Alsup, California business software titan Oracle accused Google of infringing on Java computer programming language patents and copyrights Oracle obtained when it bought Java inventor Sun Microsystems in a US$7.4 billion deal in 2009.
Oracle argued that it held copyrights to how the APIs worked even if different strings of code were used to orchestrate the tasks.
In the fast-paced land of Internet innovation, it has been common for software writers to put their own spins on APIs that mini-programs use to “talk” to one another.
Google denied the claims and said that it believes mobile handset makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.
“When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression,” Alsup said in his ruling last year. “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.”
However, the appellate judges disagreed and sent the case back to Alsup.
Google could appeal to the full appeals court panel and even pursue it to the US Supreme Court.
Appeals judges indicated in their ruling that Google might prevail on the legal grounds that “fair use” made it acceptable.
“Google can focus on asserting its fair-use defense, and hope that fair use can once again bear the increasing burden of ensuring that copyright spurs, rather than impedes, innovation,” the EFF said.
The outcome of the original trial left Oracle eligible for a relative pittance in damages.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
TECH RACE: The Chinese firm showed off its new Mate XT hours after the latest iPhone launch, but its price tag and limited supply could be drawbacks China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為) yesterday unveiled the world’s first tri-foldable phone, as it seeks to expand its lead in the world’s biggest smartphone market and steal the spotlight from Apple Inc hours after it debuted a new iPhone. The Chinese tech giant showed off its new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, during a launch ceremony in Shenzhen. The Mate XT comes in red and black and has a 10.2-inch display screen. At 3.6mm thick, it is the world’s slimmest foldable smartphone, Huawei said. The company’s Web site showed that it has garnered more than
Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) and Episil Technologies Inc (漢磊) yesterday announced plans to jointly build an 8-inch fab to produce silicon carbide (SiC) chips through an equity acquisition deal. SiC chips offer higher efficiency and lower energy loss than pure silicon chips, and they are able to operate at higher temperatures. They have become crucial to the development of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence data centers, green energy storage and industrial devices. Vanguard, a contract chipmaker focused on making power management chips and driver ICs for displays, is to acquire a 13 percent stake in Episil for NT$2.48 billion (US$77.1 million).
CROSS-STRAIT TENSIONS: The US company could switch orders from TSMC to alternative suppliers, but that would lower chip quality, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), whose products have become the hottest commodity in the technology world, on Wednesday said that the scramble for a limited amount of supply has frustrated some customers and raised tensions. “The demand on it is so great, and everyone wants to be first and everyone wants to be most,” he told the audience at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc technology conference in San Francisco. “We probably have more emotional customers today. Deservedly so. It’s tense. We’re trying to do the best we can.” Huang’s company is experiencing strong demand for its latest generation of chips, called
RSS