Oracle copied Amazon’s API – was that copyright infringement?
Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one.> Did Oracle infringe Amazon's copyright here? Ars Technica contacted Oracle to ask them if they had a license to copy Amazon's S3 API. An Oracle spokeswoman said that the S3 API was licensed under an Apache 2.0 license. She pointed us to the Amazon SDK for Java, which does indeed come with an Apache 2.0 license.> However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders.While I'm not a lawyer and didn't study the Google case in that much detail, I don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation, and skip the SDK altogether. :)