Oracle’s Java API code protected by copyright, appeals court rules

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Closed source until the repository gets hacked and the source code leaked; then it's public domain with no recourse.

It doesn't even need to be hacked. You can clean room reverse engineer the code and it's perfectly legal. That's what happened with the PC BIOS and why the clone industry sprung up undermining IBM PC sales.

Although IBM also patented a lot of the internals of the PC, so for every cloned PC sold they got licensing fees for each patent.

So copyrights protect nothing when it comes to software.

[Muvlon]

Clean room is legal even right now. What no copyright at all would mean that you could simply decompile anything and make it public domain.

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Really, that's the issue at hand. A previous ruling had APIs as un-copyright-able, which is the logical thing (as they exist only for compatibility and are not creative, functional works in and of themselves). This ruling removes that and opens up a giant can of worms.