Supreme Court Weighs Copyright Fight Between Google and Oracle. WSJ. 10-8-2020
"Oracle has accused Google of illegally copying more than 11,000 lines of Java API code to develop its Android operating system, which runs more than two billion mobile devices world-wide."
Oracle lawyer argued that what Google did is like copying "the 11,000 best lines of 'Seinfeld'." Google lawyer said "if Oracle wrote a book about how to crack safes, that wouldn’t give the company the exclusive right to open them." Not only the lawyers representing Oracle and Google, but also Supreme Court justices used analogies to understand what the 11,000 lines of code are about.
However useful the analogy, it always falls apart at some point.
I think justices should ask questions regarding what the code that Google copied actually does in API. Is it really basic code that is commonly used? Are there other ways to achieve what this 11,000 lines of code achieves? Is this code deemed creative? What is API and how is Oracle's API incorporated in Google's Android operating system? Apparently, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which ruled in Oracle's favor, "discussed a Java method with a name ending in “max"... and wrote that Google could have chosen to use a name ending in “maximum” or “larger” for this portion of code." I briefly dabbled in computer programming and one of the first things I learned was to name functions and variables in a way that everyone could easily understand. If it is a function that finds the maximum number from a list, 98 out of 100 programmers would call it "max." Would the best legal minds know this? I don't know, but I hope the justices try to parse out and (at least roughly) understand the code on the table. After all, it's another form of expression.