Last week U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington DC ruled that Oracle can copyright application programming interfaces (APIs) for the Java programming language. In a unanimous ruling the appeals court held that a district judge in California erred in 2012 by declaring that the APIs were simply a function or an idea, and not an expression subject to copyright protection. The appeals court found instead that, despite the fact Google had written its own code to implement the software, it had infringed copyright by using Oracle’s headers (declarations). According to one of Oracle's lawyers "Google copied 7,000 lines of code and the structure and organization of whole packages of highly creative software. To say that this is protected is not the same as saying that anything that might loosely be called an API is protectable under copyright law."
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