Hyderabad: This last week has seen a series of shocking legal rulings in the US that could threaten to overturn the entire tech industry if they are upheld with any degree of seriousness. We have heard a lot about the idiosyncrasies of the US patent system, which is surprisingly liberal in terms of the kind of materials it allows to be patented. In the past, people have patented natural remedies that have been known as traditional medicine for thousands of years.
A frivolous one is a patent on clicking photographs against a white background (with highly controlled lighting) that was granted to Amazon. Photographing against a white background is a technique that has been used by photographers for decades.
The motives behind Amazon’s decision to patent this form of photography are less than clear. This is not Amazon’s first contentious patent, the company had a patent on ‘one click purchasing’ in 1999. One line of thought states that they are doing this to protect themselves against a future patent on the technique by a competitor.
This is not as ridiculous as it initially sounds, considering that a court has recently ruled that Oracle’s application programming interfaces, known as APIs, were copyrightable. APIs are the building blocks of a software program they are standardised to the greatest extent possible so that people can reuse them over and over for various purposes.
In practice programming, APIs are basically a few words that give programmers access to a lot of computing power. Copyrighting APIs would result in a massive destructive influence on the software industry which relies on APIs to limit the amount of time spent reinventing the wheel so that they can focus on new features.
In the lower court, the Judge William Alsup had spent months teaching himself to code in Java before he could deliver a verdict on the case and ruled that APIs were copyrightable, however a new bench of judges has decreed that Sun code is a “not unlike literary work” and can be copyrighted.
If this ruling is upheld, it gives Oracle the power to do serious legal damage to competitors that use Java (most notably Google and its massively popular Android ecosystem) if they don’t invest huge time and effort into rewriting their codebases; a destructive move that generates no value for anyone.
The US patent system might need some serious introspection.
In the meanwhile, this might only mean more maintenance projects coming their way for Indian IT firms as companies try to flee from Oracle’s onslaught.
