Further to the code-literate judge in Oracle v Google, via Groklaw we now have his ruling that the Java APIs are not copyrightable.

It’s an exceptionally clear piece of work and a good introduction to the subject. I certainly couldn’t have written a better technical summary, although I’m sure there are bits that a non-programmer would still struggle with—for example, the judge uses the term “subroutine” without explanation.

I like the jaunty language:

After Java’s introduction in 1996, Sun […] wrote hundreds more programs to carry out various nifty functions

And he is certainly decisive. The section describing the code at issue (rangeCheck) is introduced thus:

Oracle has made much of nine lines of code that crept into both Android and Java. This circumstance is so innocuous and overblown by Oracle that the actual facts, as found herein by the judge, will be set forth below for the benefit of the court of appeals.

And in the closing remark,

[It] is important to step back and take in the breadth of Oracle’s claim. Of the 166 Java packages, 129 were not violated in any way. Of the 37 accused, 97 percent of the Android lines were new from Google and the remaining three percent were freely replicable under the merger and names doctrines. Oracle must resort, therefore, to claiming that it owns, by copyright, the exclusive right to any and all possible implementations of the taxonomy-like command structure for the 166 packages and/or any subpart thereof — even though it copyrighted only one implementation. To accept Oracle’s claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing their own different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands. No holding has ever endorsed such a sweeping proposition.

As an aside, nice to see our old friend Sega v Accolade cited again. I haven’t read all that many US legal opinions on software copyright, but I think pretty much all the ones I have seen have referred to Sega v Accolade.

You can read the whole thing on Groklaw.