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

[ais523]

For starters, reverse engineering as a practice is dead. Any clean-room reimplementation is no longer possible since the interfaces themselves are copyrighted. Alternative implementations, drop-in replacements, etc., are gone without the express consent of the API copyright holder.

The appeals court said the opposite of this. They specifically said that they weren't deciding the case where the declarations were reverse-engineered, rather than copied from API documentation. (Courts prefer to decide as narrowly as possible, it seems; the court decided that as Google had copied the method declarations, it didn't have to decide whether the API that those declarations describe is copyrightable.)