With the Christmas of 2019 completed and a staggering amount of delectable new toys around for the kids to fight over, I’ve had to repeat a long-standing parental axiom with renewed vigor:  don’t take other people’s stuff without permission. It’s a good lesson for governments and businesses as well. A case in point is that of the yet to be scheduled Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc, which the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear. The history is long and complicated and involves a near ten-year-old battle over whether one could (and should) copyright computer code, here “Application Programming Interfaces” or APIs. APIs are the ubiquitous sets of software languages that facilitate interoperability between computer programs. This all started in 2010 when Oracle filed suit against Google for copyright infringement on their in-house Java-related APIs, which Google used in part to create the Android operating system....(Read Full Article)