Further announcements have come from Judge William Alsup's courtroom in the Google versus Oracle case today. The judge has decreed programming APIs to be non-copyrightable. The ruling comes in accordance with existing copyright law declaring "a utilitarian and functional set of symbols, each to carry out a pre-assigned function" non-copyrightable under Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act. Alsup's court is the first court, district or appeals, to have specifically addressed the separate matter of API copyrightability, instead of the complete codebase copyrightability issue.
