Are API's Copyrightable?

Story first appeared in Wired.
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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Chevron Doesn't Want to Pay Damages

First appeared on Yahoo! News
Chevron Corp has filed an appeal with Ecuador's Supreme Court to review a judgment that the U.S. oil company pay $18 billion in damages for polluting the Amazon jungle.

An Ecuadorian judge ordered the U.S. major to pay the damages after a fraught legal battle that has lasted nearly two decades and looks like it will run even longer.

The California oil company inherited the case when it bought Texaco a decade ago. Its appeal on Friday argued that the lower courts violated Ecuador's constitution by refusing to take corrective action in response to what Chevron calls "extensive fraud and corruption" committed by the plaintiffs' lawyers and representatives.

Chevron said the original judgment, delivered last February by an Ecuadorian court in the jungle city of Lago Agrio, was based on faulty evidence and retroactive application of a law, while ignoring releases of liability granted to Texaco by Ecuador in the 1990s.

"Today's appeal gives (the Supreme Court) an opportunity to correct the grave injustices that have occurred in this case," Hewitt Pate, Chevron's general counsel, said in a statement.

The case is being watched closely by the oil industry for precedents that could influence other claims against companies accused of pollution in the countries where they operate.

Plaintiffs have responded to the accusations by citing Chevron's own test data in documenting the pollution and arguing that Ecuador's release for Texaco did not prevent third parties from suing for damages.

In related litigation in New York, the plaintiffs also accuse the company of mishandling soil and water samples during the Lago Agrio trial by maintaining two different laboratories, based on testimony from a Chevron expert.

Along with the appeal in Ecuador, Chevron asked that it not be required to post a bond to prevent enforcement of the judgment during the appeal process, arguing that such a payment would violate Ecuador's obligations under an order issued last February by an international arbitration tribunal.

Pablo Fajardo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the next step would be to see whether the Lago Agrio appeals court requires Chevron to pay.

"If it asks (Chevron) to pay a bond, and if it pays the bond, then only the bond can stop us from carrying out the sentence," Fajardo told Reuters.

Asked if the plaintiffs were looking at any country in particular where it could seek to collect the damages, he said they would first await the decision on the bond. "We haven't done anything, we don't have any plans yet," Fajardo said.

Chevron no longer has assets in Ecuador, so questions surround the enforcement of the original ruling. A lawyer for the company accused the plaintiffs last May of planning to seek enforcement in countries hostile to Chevron.

The entire case may be reheard far from both Ecuador and the United States. The arbitration tribunal in The Hague, operating under a U.S.-Ecuador treaty, ordered Ecuador to take all measures at its disposal to suspend enforcement of the Lago Agrio judgment until the arbitrators have their say.

The tribunal is expected to rule any day on the question of whether or not it has jurisdiction in the case.