Appeal to Reason
Bradley M. Kuhn wrote an analysis on the recent Appeals Court Decision in Oracle v. Google. Pointing out who the real winners are and that it will now take years before we will have more clarity:
The case is remanded, so a new jury will first sit down and consider the fair use question. If that jury finds fair use and thus no infringement, Oracle’s next appeal will be quite weak, and the Appeals Court likely won’t reexamine the question in any detail. In that outcome, very little has changed overall: we’ll have certainty that API’s aren’t copyrightable, as long as any textual copying that occurs during reimplementation is easily called fair use. By contrast, if the new jury rejects Google’s fair use defense, I suspect Google will have to appeal all the way to SCOTUS. It’s thus going to be at least two years before anything definitive is decided, and the big winners will be wealthy litigation attorneys — as usual.
You will want to read the whole thing to know why from a copyleft perspective this decision will give that strange feeling of simultaneous annoyance and contentment.