Part V: Oracle Wanted the Court to See the Forest for the Trees Last time, I explained the painstaking “abstraction-filtration-comparison” test (or “AFC test”) that most courts use to determine the extent of copyright protection for computer code. The test is tedious...
Part IV: Why Oracle Needed a New Legal Theory Worse Than Huey Lewis Needed a New Drug Last time, we looked at why half of each Java API “method” wasn’t copyrightable (because there was only one reasonable way to express the functionality) and that the...
Part III: What Happens to Copyright Protection When There’s Only One Reasonable Way to Code Something Through philosophical discussions of motorcycle maintenance, pancakes and old 1980’s TV ads involving peanut butter and chocolate, my last two posts can be...
Part II: When Expression and Function Collide We’re talking about computer code in Oracle v. Google, and computer code is challenging because it’s expressive but also functional. Last time, I explained that when functionality gets mixed up with expression,...
Part I: APIs and IP The big Oracle v. Google order holding that the Java API is not copyrightable is now about two months old, but software developers are still talking about it because APIs (“application programming interfaces”) are so crucial to what developers do....
But it’s Sad, Sad News for Momma Partridge Even when I was a little kid, I didn’t like the Partridge Family. It came on late in the afternoon (in syndication, of course), after some Looney Tunes-type cartoons. It always seemed to start promisingly, with a little...
