Application Programming Interfaces (API): A Primer and Discussion of Oracle America v. Google
In 2010 Oracle America, Inc., filed suit against Google, Inc., in the Northern District of
California (Case No. C 10–03561) (Alsup, J.), and alleged that Google infringed Oracles’
copyright in its Java Application Programming Interface (“API”). The parties and the Court
agreed that everyone was and remains free to program in the Java language itself, and that
Google was free to use the Java language to write its own API. However, while Google took
care to provide fresh line-by-line implementations in 97 percent of the Java API, it generally
replicated the overall name organization and functionality of 37 packages in the Java API (three
percent).