Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Brief of Amici Curiae Computer Scientists in Oracle America Inc., v. Google Inc., No. 2013-1021 (Fed. Cir.)

2013; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.2403530

1556-5068

Julie Samuels, Jason Schultz, Michael J. Barclay,

Open Source Software Innovations

The freedom to reimplement and extend existing APIs has been the key to competition and progress in the computer field — both hardware and software. It made possible the emergence and success of many robust industries we now take for granted — such as industries for mainframes, PCs, peripherals (storage, modems, printers, sound cards, etc.), workstations/servers, and so on — by ensuring that competitors could challenge established players and advance the state of the art. Thus, excluding APIs from copyright protection has been essential to the development of modern computers and the Internet. For example, the widespread availability of diverse, cheap, and customizable personal computers owes its existence to the lack of copyright on the specification for IBM’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) for the PC. Companies such as Compaq and Phoenix reimplemented IBM’s BIOS without fear of copyright claims, making PC clones possible. And the open nature of APIs was essential to many modern computing developments, including those of operating systems such as UNIX, programming languages such as "C", the Internet’s network protocols, and cloud computing.