A San Francisco court has spent the past few weeks considering a copyright question that could weigh heavy on the future of cloud computing, according to San Diego Copyright Lawyers.
It’s part of a high-profile lawsuit between Oracle and Google. Oracle says that Google violated its copyrights and patents when it wrote its own version of Java for the Android mobile operating system. Part of what the court is trying to figure out this week is whether Google wronged Oracle by writing software that mimicked the Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs are coding standards that let programs communicate with one another).
The conventional wisdom in the coder community has been that it’s fine to reproduce the interface of someone else’s APIs, so long as you don’t actually copy their software. So if the court finds that APIs are copyrightable, it could have major implications for any software that uses APIs without explicit permission — Linux for example. But it could affect things in the cloud, where there are several efforts to clone Amazon’s Web Services APIs.
If APIs can be copy-protected, that would be incredibly destructive to the internet as a whole for so many different reasons. But, with respect to cloud, in particular, it would put any company that has implemented the Amazon APIs at risk unless they have some kind of agreement with Amazon on those APIs.
An open source effort called OpenStack is the most prominent example of a project that mimics Amazon’s APIs, and the case could give Amazon legal grounds to seek licensing deals from OpenStack users such as Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace.
But other projects reproduce Amazon’s APIs, including Citrix’s CloudStack project and middleware such as Jclouds and Fog.
The problems that would face cloud computing are many of the same problems we’d see, frankly, all over the internet if APIs were copyrightable.
Depending on how a U.S. District Court Judge rules, the U.S. could have a different take on this question from the rest of the world. This week, a European court ruled that APIs are not copyrightable, and the judge has asked Google and Oracle to submit briefs on how that ruling should be viewed by the court. Both parties have until May 14 to comment on this, so it doesn’t look like Alsup plans to rule on the copyright question until after then. Just to make matters more complicated, a jury is simultaneously deliberating Oracle’s case, but they won’t be answering the API copyright question; that’s up to the judge himself.
One thing that makes the issue particularly troubling for open source projects is the extremely long shelf life of copyrights. Patents expire after less than 20 years, but copyright would protect the Amazon APIs for 95 years from the date they were first published.
On the bright side, at least for open source hackers, is the possibility that a ruling in favor of copyright-protecting APIs could push cloud providers to come up with new, open, standard APIs. But it’s not much of a sliver lining. While that’s potentially useful for cloud computing, it is more concerning about the implications for the internet as a whole. Or, more realistically, America’s role in building internet companies. No other country is going to honor the idea of copyrighted APIs.
Adding to the uncertainty, Amazon has never said whether it thinks companies that implement its APIs violate its copyright. Amazon, for example, has a partnership with another cloud company that implements its APIs, called Eucalyptus, but neither company could immediately provide a comment saying whether their agreement covered API copyright or not.
No one actually knows outside of Amazon what their attitude is toward the stewardship of their APIs and what people can do with them.
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