Java APIs have copyright.
On May 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
decided the important question of the copyrightability of
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) in a case which pitted two
giants of the computer world Oracle and Google against each other.
The Federal Circuit overruled a district court decision that
Oracle's API packages in its JAVA language were not eligible
for copyright protection. Oracle America, Inc. Google Inc. CAFA
2013-102.
Oracle had created the Java programming language and as part of
that language had developed 37 API packages. Each package
consisted of two types of source code: (1) "declaring
code" and (2) "implementing code". Google admitted
copying 7,000 lines of "declaring code" but had written
its own implementing code when developing its Android language.
