Could an Oracle Win Against Google Blow Up the Cloud?
- May 7, 2012 |
- 6:30 am |
- Categories: Announcements, Hardware, Infrastructure as a Service, Litigation, Mergers and Acquisitions
What will happen to companies that clone Amazon's APIs if APIs can be copyrighted? Photo: U.S. Air Force
A San Francisco court has spent the past few weeks considering a copyright question that could weigh heavy on the future of cloud computing.
It’s part of a high-profile lawsuit between Oracle and Google. Oracle says that Google violated its copyrights and patents when it wrote its own version of Java for the Android mobile operating system. Part of what the court is trying to figure out this week is whether Google wronged Oracle by writing software that mimicked the Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs are coding standards that let programs communicate with one another).
The conventional wisdom in the coder community has been that it’s fine to reproduce the interface of someone else’s APIs, so long as you don’t actually copy their software. So if the court finds that APIs are copyrightable, it could have major implications for any software that uses APIs without explicit permission — Linux for example. But it could affect things in the cloud, where there are several efforts to clone Amazon’s Web Services APIs.
“If APIs can be copy-protected, that would be incredibly destructive to the internet as a whole for so many different reasons,” says George Reese, Chief Technology Officer with enStratus Networks, a seller of cloud management services. “But with respect to cloud, in particular, it would put any company that has implemented the Amazon APIs at risk unless they have some kind of agreement with Amazon on those APIs.”
An open source effort called OpenStack is the most prominent example of a project that mimics Amazon’s APIs, and the case could give Amazon legal grounds to seek licensing deals from OpenStack users such as Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace.
But other projects reproduce Amazon’s APIs, including Citrix’s CloudStack project and middleware such as Jclouds and Fog.
“The problems that would face cloud computing are many of the same problems we’d see, frankly, all over the internet if APIs were copyrightable,” says Julie Samuels, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has been following the trial.
Depending on how U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup rules, the U.S. could have a different take on this question from the rest of the world. This week, a European court ruled that APIs are not copyrightable, and Alsup has asked Google and Oracle to submit briefs on how that ruling should be viewed by the court. Both parties have until May 14 to comment on this, so it doesn’t look like Alsup plans to rule on the copyright question until after then. Just to make matters more complicated, a jury is simultaneously deliberating Oracle’s case, but they won’t be answering the API copyright question; that’s up to Alsup himself.
One thing that makes the issue particularly troubling for open source projects is the extremely long shelf life of copyrights, Samuels says. Patents expire after less than 20 years, but copyright would protect the Amazon APIs for 95 years from the date they were first published, she says. “Copyright lasts a hell of a lot longer than patent protection.”
On the bright side, at least for open source hackers, is the possibility that a ruling in favor of copyright-protecting APIs could push cloud providers to come up with new, open, standard APIs. But it’s not much of a sliver lining, according to enStratus’s Reese. “While that’s potentially useful for cloud [computing],” he says. “I am much more concerned about the implication for the internet as a whole. Or, more realistically, America’s role in building internet companies. No other country is going to honor the idea of copyrighted APIs.”
Adding to the uncertainty, Amazon has never said whether it thinks companies that implement its APIs violate its copyright. Amazon, for example, has a partnership with another cloud company that implements its APIs, called Eucalyptus, but neither company could immediately provide a comment saying whether their agreement covered API copyright or not.
“No one actually knows outside of Amazon what their attitude is toward the stewardship of their APIs and what people can do with them,” says Jason Hoffman, the chief technology officer with Amazon competitor Joyent. Joyent uses its own APIs, not Amazon’s.
Hoffman says that Joyent is fine with other companies cloning its APIs, because its core intellectual property lies elsewhere. “The APIs are not the thing that makes or breaks our business,” he says. “Our margins depend on extremely good software that’s meant to manage a bunch of data centers.”
Robert McMillan is a writer with Wired Enterprise. Got a tip? Send him an email at: robert_mcmillan [at] wired.com.
Follow @bobmcmillan on Twitter.
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