openpolitics.com

But since the appeals court has already ruled that APIs are subject to copyright, that could open a whole new frontier of lawsuits aimed at startups and open source projects that have copied APIs in order to ensure their products are compatible with popular commercial products.

For example, several companies have built open source software that works with various cloud services in an attempt to make it easier for customers to easily move their applications from, say, Amazon to their own data centers. Basho and SwiftStack, to name just two, each offer storage products that are compatible with Amazon’s cloud storage service S3. Since APIs are subject to copyright, Amazon could in theory go after both companies for copyright violations.

Meanwhile, many open source operating systems, such as FreeBSD and those based on Linux, use a standard API called POSIX, which is based on the API of AT&T’s Unix operating system. Under the appeals court’s ruling, AT&T could go after the makers of POSIX operating systems.

“Both of those scenarios are more likely after Oracle v. Google,
regardless of how the jury decides,” says Mitch Stoltz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

.. Many newer development platforms, including Google’s Go language and Apple’s Swift, are licensed under more liberal terms than Java and allow for-profit companies to use and modify them.