Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
>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?To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle's claims...Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java.  Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.Instead, Google copied the API of function name spellings 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:  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852100So 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 too much 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.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.