FOSS Patents: Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
true interoperability while affording software creations a reasonable degree of intellectual property protection. In most cases software copyright isn't an obstacle to interoperability because the creators of application programming interfaces (APIs) frequently have an interest in the adoption of their creations. Self-regulation works, and it actually is possible to do clean-room implementations of the Java APIs, subject to reasonable terms and conditions that Google didn't want to accept. But every now and then there could be a problem with a right holder wielding copyright in an effort to p...
Source: fosspatents.com