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0 pointsDiabloD35y ago0 comments

Generally, the Supreme Court finds narrowly on a specific point of friction in the case of a lesser court, answers the question, and kicks it back to that court, as a final answer for that very specific thing.

The point in this case was, can Oracle overturn the "phone books cannot be Copyrighted" concept baked into tech law by the IBM v Compaq BIOS case. Seems the Supreme Court finally told Oracle the collection of method signatures from the Java base API are, indeed, a phone book.

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throwaway85815y ago

You are just totally wrong, the majority did not issue a ruling on copyrightability. It just said that even if the API is copyrightable Google's actions were "fair use," which is a legal doctrine allowing some use of copyrighted works without a license.

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