Few of the Supreme Court Justices Seemed to Understand What an API Is or Does, But Their Decision Was a Victory Shout for Software Developers of All Kinds, Including Open Source Developers
You can be forgiven if you’re not 100 percent certain what the US Supreme Court ruled in its Google vs. Oracle decision. Yes, we know that “Google won”—or, as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, “Google’s copying [of the Java API] did not violate the copyright law.” This is true, but goes only so far. Google, after all, had gone to court with two big arguments: one, that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and two, that even if APIs are copyrightable, Google’s use of the Java API to develop Android constituted fair use.
The US Supreme Court sidestepped the first question, arguably the more important of the two, with Breyer writing, “Given the rapidly changing technological, economic, and business-related circumstances, we believe we should not answer more than is necessary to resolve the parties’ dispute.” That’s better than what the world would have looked like had the Court sided with Oracle, which would have “threaten[ed] disastrous consequences for innovation,” as Microsoft offered in its amicus brief.
Still, we’re left with an industry where APIs might or might not be copyrightable. The considerable solace, however, is that courts have been given the nod to take a generous view on fair use as related to APIs and interoperability, one that makes developer utility central to the doctrine of fair use.
A world of copyrightable APIs…
Last year Hannu Valtonen outlined all that could go wrong if APIs were deemed to be copyrightable. Developers, quite simply, would have to unlearn decades of common development practices, while business interests could set up toll gates on their APIs to monetize them. It would also become dramatically harder to achieve compatibility across products, entrenching big corporate interests.
In a word, it would be terrible.
Yet we’re not actually any farther away from this potential future today than we were before the US Supreme Court ruled, because they ducked the issue. Justice Clarence Thomas fired off in his dissent, stating, “By skipping over the copyrightability question, the majority disregards half the relevant statutory text and distorts its fair-use analysis.” I don’t blame the Justices for skipping that question, because based on the questions they’d been asking the counsel for both parties, it seems likely that few of them (Justice Breyer excepted) really understood what an API is or does. Digging into the copyrightability question would perhaps have required them to grasp the function of APIs better than they were capable of.