Judge in Oracle-Google case: you cannot copyright an API    The
industry received some good news yesterday, however, as the
judge in the Oracle-Google Java lawsuit ruled that APIs cannot
be copyrighted. Previously, the jury in the case had decided
that Google violated Oracle's copyrights in mimicking the
structure and organization of Java APIs in Android.  The jury's
decision, if left to stand, could have created an epic nightmare
in the software world but yesterday Judge William Alsup reversed
that decision, ruling that, under today's copyright law, Google
did not infringe upon Oracle's Java copyrights. "So long as the
specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is
free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to
carry out exactly the same function or specification of any
methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the
declaration or method header lines are identical," he wrote in
his decision.  In other words, because Google essentially
implemented API functions using