(CNN Business) A historic, multibillion-dollar lawsuit between Oracle and Google may come down to the jumbled attempts on Wednesday by eight Supreme Court justices to find an appropriate analogy to describe common computer code. The rapid-fire string of analogies, along with the wide range of justices' questions, left the case's fate in doubt. The outcome could determine the future of software development in the United States -- and, by extension, the future of a world that's increasingly dominated by digital services and technology. These helper programs, known as software interfaces, application programming interfaces or APIs, are a ubiquitous feature of today's networked digital economy, where different apps need to be able to work together and share information. Oracle asserts that this type of code, at least as created by Sun Microsystems, is nevertheless an expressive work that is eligible for copyright protections.

Source: CNN October 07, 2020 20:26 UTC