Innovation Policy Post

Last week, CCIA filed an amicus brief [PDF] with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Oracle v. Google.  Oracle’s initial complaint included both copyright and patent claims, and the court decided to split it up into separate cases.  (For more information on the rather complicated procedural history, ArsTechnica has a series of posts following each development.)  CCIA’s brief was filed in an appeal of the case involving the copyrightability of APIs.  CCIA urged the Federal Circuit to affirm the district court’s finding that Oracle’s APIs at issue were not copyrightable.  

CCIA’s brief also focused on the important historical context underlying this area of law and policy.  There have been decades of court decisions, that were later codified, that protect the important principle of interoperability.  There is an interoperability exception in the DMCA, and many free trade agreements mandate that signatories have protections for interoperability.  Nations around the world have followed suit and passed legislation permitting reverse engineering in order to achieve interoperability.

CCIA has been filing amicus briefs in support of interoperability for more than twenty years; they are all available on this page: http://www.ccianet.org/interop.  CCIA is optimistic that the Federal Circuit will affirm this long-held principle that is crucial to this industry.