Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

Enlarge / "Everybody knows that APIs, declaring codes, are not copyrightable," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during Wednesday's oral arguments. But most of her colleagues didn't seem convinced. (credit: Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court's eight justices on Wednesday seemed skeptical of Google's argument that application programming interfaces (APIs) are not protected by copyright law. The high court was hearing oral arguments in Google's decade-long legal battle with Oracle. Oracle argues that Google infringed its copyright in the Java programming language when it re-implemented Java APIs for use by Android app developers.

The stakes in the case are high for Google, which could owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. More importantly, an Oracle win could reshape how copyright law treats APIs, giving incumbents the power to lock out competitors who want to build compatible software.

For decades prior to Oracle's lawsuit, most people in the software industry assumed that APIs couldn't be copyrighted. That meant a software company could re-implement the APIs of a competitor's product in order to enable software, designed to work with the competitor's product, to work with its own.

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