Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc.,750 F.3d 1339 (Fed. Cir. 2014), Cert. Denied: Ideas, Methods, And Expression - Whose Innovation is Protected?
Christopher J. Geissler · Scholarship at Catholic Law (Catholic University of America) · 2015
The Federal Circuit recently expanded the protections of the Copyright Act to thirty-seven packages of Oracle's application program interface because Java's declaring source code contains expression and is not exclusively functional.What does this mean and what are its implications?I. THE JAVA PACKAGES Java created 166 application program interfaces (known as "APIs" or "packages") which function as shortcuts for programmers to build certain functions into their programs.1 APIs are split into declaring code and implementing code. 2 Declaring code is the expression that identifies the pre-written function.3