This article originally appeared in TechCrunch, and is republished here with permission.
The Supreme Court heard arguments October 7 in Google v. Oracle. This case raises a fundamental question for software developers and the open source community: whether copyright may prevent developers from using software’s functional interfaces – known as APIs – to advance innovation in software. The Court should say no — free and open APIs protect innovation, competition, and job mobility for software developers in America.
An interface allows two things to communicate. When we use an interface, we don’t need to understand (or care) about how the function on the other side of the interface is performed. It just works. When you sit down at your computer, the ‘qwerty’ keyboard allows you to rapidly put words on the screen. When you submit an online payment to a vendor, you are certain the funds will appear in the vendor’s account. It just works.
In the software world, interfaces between software programs are called “application programming interfaces” or APIs. APIs date back to the 1950s and allow developers to write programs that reuse other program functionality without knowing how that functionality is performed. If your program needs to sort a list, you could have it use a sorting program’s API to sort the list for your program. It just works.
Developers have historically used software interfaces free of copyright concerns, and this freedom has accelerated innovation, software interoperation, and developer job mobility. Developers using existing APIs save time and effort, allowing those savings to be refocused on new ideas. Developers can also reimplement APIs from one software platform to others, enabling innovation to flow freely across software platforms. Importantly, reusing APIs gives developers job portability, since knowledge of one set of APIs is more applicable cross-industry. The upcoming Google v. Oracle decision could change this, harming developers, open source software, and the entire software industry.
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