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EFF in Oracle v. Google: APIs should not be copyrightable

eff-og-1bThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court arguing, on behalf of 77 computer scientist signatories, that the justices should review an inexplicable lower court decision finding that application programming interfaces (APIs) are copyrightable. That decision, in a case in which Oracle sought to copyright the Java API, up-ended decades of settled legal precedent and industry practice.

Among the 77 computer scientists on behalf of whom EFF filed the brief are UW CSE professor Ed Lazowska, UW CSE Ph.D. alums Jeff Dean and Ed Felten, and UW CSE Bachelors alum Tim Paterson.

Read more here.