The Supreme Court on Wednesday considered a multibillion-dollar copyright battle between Oracle Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, with justices appearing to look for a resolution that would retain legal protections for software code without throwing the tech industry into disarray. Mr. Rosenkranz said Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. spent billions developing their platform code, and Google should have done so as well. Google lawyer Thomas Goldstein told the court that copyright protections aren’t supposed to extend to basic computer code that relates to how software functions. “The long-settled practice of reusing software interfaces is critical to modern interoperable computer software,” Mr. Goldstein said. “If you let somebody have a copyright on that now, they would control all typewriters, which really has nothing to do with copyright,” Justice Breyer said.

Source: Wall Street Journal October 07, 2020 21:34 UTC