Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
<i>&gt;This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product?</i><p>To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle&#x27;s claims...<p>Google didn&#x27;t copy any of Oracle&#x2F;Sun&#x27;s <i>Java source code base</i> into Android Java.  Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.<p>Instead, Google copied the <i>API of function name spellings</i> and also the hierarchy of organization (tree of namespaces) of those API methods.  I asked about this in a previous comment and some folks more familiar with the case replied with citations of court opinions:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7852100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7852100</a><p>So to give a flippant summary of the current situation:  you _can_ copy some exact spellings of API function names (e.g. other browsers Chrome&#x2F;Firefox&#x2F;Safari can copy Microsoft IE XMLHttpRequest() exactly without renaming it to RetrieveHttpXtensibleMarkupLang()) -- as long as you don&#x27;t copy <i>too much</i> of the API surface area.  The threshold of &quot;too much&quot; and getting in legal trouble is yet to be determined by The US Supreme Court.<p>If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions.  We&#x27;ll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.