> There is one thing the jury won't know: the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted at all is actually up in the air. It's a legal gray area that will be decided by Judge William Alsup—but only after the jury gives its verdict in this case. (When that happens, even a jury verdict in Oracle's favor could be a hollow one.)
That is awful. Honestly, the idea of APIs, and not their implementation, being copyrighted makes no sense to me, since it goes against the fundamental principle behind copyright law (versus patent law).
If a juror genuinely believes that the idea of copyrighting APIs and extending that copyright to alternate implementations makes no sense, how can they come up with a decision that's anything but arbitrary? That's like me saying, 'Assume that 1 * 5 = 0, and then decide if if the satisfiability problem can be solved in linear time'.
If you give me a nonsensical set of assumptions, how can I come up with an answer that's not also nonsensical? If you give me some messed up numerical system like that one, well sure, maybe those definitions would propagate though to the definition of polynomial complexity as well. But what does that mean for the real world? Nothing - and law is meant to be applied, not some abstract theoretical exercise.
> There is one thing the jury won't know: the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted at all is actually up in the air. It's a legal gray area that will be decided by Judge William Alsup—but only after the jury gives its verdict in this case. (When that happens, even a jury verdict in Oracle's favor could be a hollow one.)
which is exactly what felipeko was referring to.