The Supreme Court is currently considering a case, Google v. Oracle America, that could have a dramatic effect on copyright law in general and specifically on the copyright protection for software. So important is this case for intellectual property (IP) that ALEC filed an amicus brief, that is, a friend of the court brief in the case. That brief can be found here.
Nearly 10 years ago, Oracle filed a lawsuit against Google claiming that Google took part of the software code, called Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, to use in Google’s Android operating system. An API is a part of software that follows a communication protocol between different parts of a computer program. In other words, an API is what makes software interoperable with other programs and hardware — think of the plastic side of Velcro with all the little hooks to be able to latch on to material.
Yet where greater use of health technologies is concerned consumers often seem to be promised big advances and told of coming innovations only to see that they are actually years away from being real. That is to say, despite a clear indication of its value, the implementation seems to be delayed or even simply fail to materialize. Just one example is the ever-elusive promise of electronic health records.
Recent Comments