Uggh. It's the fucking Federal Circuit Court, again.
Google’s nerd witnesses are hamstrung on their ability to explain the motivations behind their actions, because a big part of the sequence of events that led up to Oracle v. Google is that no one thought the Java APIs were copyrightable. Programming languages aren’t copyrightable because they were only valuable insofar as many programmers could freely use them. And it is impossible to implement programming languages without the APIs. Copyrighting a Java API would be absurd. It’s why Sun never threatened to sue Apache Harmony for their implementation of Java, it’s why Sun put out their own open source implementation of Java themselves. But ever since a bunch of normals at the Federal Circuit decided in 2014 that the structure, sequence, and organization of the Java APIs are copyrightable, copyrightable they are—and now Google witnesses are struggling to explain their actions as part of a long shared history in an insular community of nerds with their own language, their own mythology, their own intuitions about software and intellectual property.
Incidentally, Sarah Jeong is a national treasure. To wit:
No one bothered to challenge Schwartz’s apparent belief that hamburgers are commonly featured on breakfast menus...
I still miss 5 Useful Articles, though. Sniff
