Google and the Fair Use Defense

In 2010, Oracle decided to take Google to court over a copyright issue involving Java's APIs. Having a questionable attention span at best, I haven't been following the case through all its intricate twists. Google had initially won the case in 2012, when Judge William Alsup decided that APIs were not subject to copyright laws.

"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."

- Judge William Alsup

Which makes sense when one considers that these APIs were for general use, and that these APIs, while borrowing heavily from their source material, had been reverse engineered and re-implemented for Google's Android Java.

Surprise - in 2014, the ruling was overturned. The SSO of APIs were now subject to copyright, and Google found itself in a fight again.

This was a source of consternation in the open source community. There is, and always has been, a great tradition of sharing. We took each other's ideas, expanded on them, and took them in new directions. We read each other's code, learned from it, perhaps added to it, and passed it on. We were always reasonably secure in the knowledge that as long as we didn't do anything outrageous like copy someone's stuff wholesale, pass it off as our own and profit from it; we were well within our legal rights. Now this?

A week ago, Google won via the use of the "Fair Use" defense. The court ruled in Google's favor.

In effect, Google landed a solid blow to the jaw of Oracle's lawsuit. It was a welcome blow struck on the behalf of open-source developers everywhere.

The winner via
knockout...

Because while Google was ostensibly the winner in this bout, make no mistake - had Google lost, it would have been a sad day for those of us peddling open source. From the lowliest hobbyist to the sweatshop code monkeys, to system engineers in tech behemoths. Sure, people like me are too small potatoes to even register on Oracle's radar. But we work for people who do leverage on open source technology one way or another. And if Oracle had won this one, the effects would not have stopped at Google. The fallout would have affected all businesses leveraging on open source technology, now leery of continuing on their current path. And that would have affected employment opportunities. Resources diverted to prepare for legal battles. Way, way less peace of mind.

Remember, Google can afford to pay legal fees and fight court battles. Google could perhaps even afford to lose the case. What about the rest of us?

Yes, I'm being simplistic here. But that's the gist of it.

So Google won. Yay, Fair Use FTW. Thing is - should it even have gotten to that point? I'm no lawyer, but open source is open source. With that particular high-profile court case, any sense of security we might have had while using Java (or indeed, any other open source platform) just took a serious dent.

It's not over yet!

Oracle has declared their intention to appeal the decision. Let's see how that turns out.

What a sueperb win,
T___T