A group of computer experts – including me – asked a US court to think again about fair use of APIs this month.

It was an unlucky fact that Oracle’s case against Google over Android started with patents. Their initial case fell apart almost immediately, with almost all the patent claims invalidated. The implausable backstop copyright case Oracle made against Android’s use of language-essential definitions in the Java APIs (and thus against the freedom of developers everywhere) carried on though. The initial patent case meant that the appeal when Oracle soundly lost ended up at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) — the specialist patent appeals court in the USA — and not at a court competent to dispense copyright justice.  Continue reading →