A Federal Circuit panel appeared Wednesday to strongly disagree with a San Francisco federal judge’s ruling last year that basic elements of the Java programming language cannot be copyrighted. That would hand a big win to Oracle, which accuses Google of stealing the so-called declaring code from its Java application program interface and riding it to spectacular success with its Android mobile operating system.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Google had limited its copying to the “command structure” of the API, and that part cannot be copyrighted. But Federal Circuit Judge Kathleen O’Malley suggested the theory was unworkable, saying it would let Google copy reams of computer code from competitors such as Apple and Microsoft. “You could take all their declaring code,” she told Google attorney Robert Van Nest of San Francisco’s Keker & Van Nest.
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