My Latest EFF Amicus Brief: 77 Computer Scientists Ask The Supreme Court To Review Oracle v. Google

Last Friday, EFF filed the latest amicus brief I helped write, in the Oracle v. Google case.  The case involves Oracle's claim that Java's Application Programming Interfaces (API) are copyrightable.  Generally speaking, APIs are specifications that allow computer programs to communicate with each other, or to allow a program to communicate with a human being.

In May 2012, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that the Java APIs were not protected by copyright.  Oracle appealed to the U.S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; as part of that appeal, EFF filed an amicus brief on behalf of 32 computer scientists.

In a terrible decision in May 2014, the Federal Circuit reversed Judge Alsup and held that APIs are copyrightable.  The Federal Circuit went out of its way to disagree with the Lotus v. Borland case I worked on twenty years ago, which dealt with similar issues.  The circuit court's decision was harshly criticized by nearly every commentator who wrote about the case (the sole possible exception being a paid consultant for Oracle).  One commentary observed, "The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too" (that commentator previously observed how the Federal Circuit has damaged the patent system).

In October, Google asked the Supreme Court to review this case; its petition for certiorari is here (or here).  On Friday, EFF and other groups filed amicus briefs supporting the petition.  EFF's amicus brief was on behalf of an expanded group of 77 computer scientists.  As explained in EFF's press release, signatories to the brief include five Turing Award winners, four National Medal of Technology winners, and numerous fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The list also includes designers of computer systems and programming languages such as AppleScript, AWK, C++, Haskell, IBM S/360, Java, JavaScript, Lotus 1-2-3, MS-DOS, Python, Scala, SmallTalk, TCP/IP, Unix, and Wiki.  ArsTechnica's article about EFF's filing is here; other articles or discussion boards are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Articles by Public Knowledge about its amicus brief are here and here.  CCIA's amicus brief is here.  Other articles about all three of these amicus briefs are here and here.

The Law Professor's brief, filed by Pam Samuelson of U.C. Berkeley, is here.