Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
<i>>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's claims...<p>Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun'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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852100" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/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/Firefox/Safari can copy Microsoft IE XMLHttpRequest() exactly without renaming it to RetrieveHttpXtensibleMarkupLang()) -- as long as you don't copy <i>too much</i> of the API surface area.  The threshold of "too much" 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'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.