The Federal Circuit reversed the district court and held that Oracle’s Java API declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of its API packages are entitled to copyright protection — reversing the landmark ruling that APIs were not copyrightable and remanding the fair use ques
The Federal Circuit held that Voter Verified’s copyright claim against Premier Election Solutions for voter verification software failed under the merger doctrine — finding that the specific expression in the claimed software code was inseparable from the underlying idea of a voter-verified pa
The Federal Circuit held that violation of an open-source software license condition — not merely a contractual covenant — constitutes copyright infringement, giving open-source licensors the full array of copyright remedies (including injunctions and statutory damages) rather than only contract dam
The Federal Circuit held that the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision does not create a new property right and requires proof that access was unauthorized; because Chamberlain implicitly authorized customers to use third-party transmitters, Skylink’s universal garage door opener did not
The Federal Circuit held that a shrink-wrap license contractually prohibiting reverse engineering of software is enforceable and not preempted by federal copyright law, even though copyright law itself permits reverse engineering in certain circumstances.