<P> In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation of Java embedded in the Android operating system . Google had not acquired any permission to reproduce the Java API, although permission had been given to the similar OpenJDK project . Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle v. Google case that APIs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S, and that a victory for Oracle would have widely expanded copyright protection and allowed the copyrighting of simple software commands: </P> <P> To accept Oracle's claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing their own different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands . </P> <P> In 2014, however, Alsup's ruling was overturned on appeal, though the question of whether such use of APIs constitutes fair use was left unresolved . </P> <P> In 2016, following a two - week trial, a jury determined that Google's reimplementation of the Java API constituted fair use, but Oracle vowed to appeal the decision . Oracle won on its appeal, with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling that Google's use of the APIs did not qualify for fair use . </P>

An application programming interface (api) is the code