Year in Review at the BYU Copyright & Trademark Symposium 2021

Last week what the Brigham Young University Copyright & Trademark Symposium. It was a one-day event on Zoom and was open to all. I attended two sessions, with this one being the first.  My notes are on the second speaker, who spoke about copyright.

The speaker was Mike Erickson from Shareholder, Ray Quinney & Nebeker.  I appreciated his focus on this one case and the amount of detail he covered. (Too must detail and too base for my note taking.) While this case was not new for me, I appreciated rehearing all of the details and the fair use analysis.

Google v. Oracle, 141 S.Ct. 1183 (2021) - The is about Sun Microsystems and their development of Java. Java allows you to write a program once and then run that program anywhere. This ability was not unique to Java, but Java took this to another level. It was platform agnostic. He spent time talking about Java code, how it is compiled, and then turned into machine code.

Google wanted to get into the smartphone business. They developed the Android operating system and had wanted to incorporate Java into it, but could not get an agreement from Sun.  Without that agreement, they created their own Java environment. 

What did the courts do? (My notes are brief.)

• The District Court found that the Java's API declaring code to be uncopyrightable. 
• Federal Circuit reversed on copyrightability and remanded for trail on fair use.
• Jury found fair use.
• Federal Circuit reversed finding no fair use.
• Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit by looking at the four factors of fair use.  
• They began by looking at the Nature of the Copyrighted Work. They found that the declaring code was not expressive. It is just a naming system. "Unlike many of programs, its value in significant part derives from the value that those who do not hold copyrights, namely, computer programmers, invest of their own time and effort to learn the API's system.
• Purpose and Character of the Use - "Google copied portions of the Sun Java API...for the same reason that Sun created those sections..."
• Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Used - yes a lot of code, but small when looking at the entire code.  It was only 0.4%.
• Market Effects - Where is the profitability of the Android system? 
• The majority said that if it is copyrightable, it is barely copyrightable.
  

Resources

• Supreme Court Opinion (2021)
  
• Shaleen Patel.  (May 2021) Supreme Court Leaves As Many Questions As It Answers In 'Google v. Oracle'. Law Journal Newsletters.
• Irah Donner. (June 2021) Google’s Copying of APIs Held Transformative and Fair Use. JDSupra.