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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

I believe it was decided that they are copyrightable but that using them for compatibility purposes is fair use.

No, it's stranger than that: SCOTUS did not rule on copyrightability of APIs at all, but simply ruled that even if they are copyrightable, what Google did (completely reimplement Sun/Oracle's public API) was still fair use.

It would have been nice to get a clear SCOTUS precedent on this. On the other hand, I also value a SCOTUS which rules minimally and narrowly by default (I also appreciate SCOTUS' return to stricter constitutional grounding in the past decade).

Incredibly loud laughing from the lawyers whose study of law is being thrown around willy nilly because of all the unprecedented joke decisions they are making right now.

We are stuck between a rock and a hard place politically. The real decisions should be coming from Congress not the courts. However, Congress is too disorganized and disconnected to answer the important questions, leaving the courts to either muddle along or else become semi-dictatorial. In most countries, this would cause a constitutional crisis, but the modern U.S. system seems to be a little too resilient to such otherwise concerning signals.

We're far past a constitutional crisis, and the courts taking power nobody wanted to give to them (who wasn't interested in a unitary executive at least) isn't a good solution.

What constitutional crisis has occurred that hasn't been resolved?

Constitutional crises involve fundamental breaks in the working of government that bring two or more of its elements into direct conflict that can't be reconciled through the normal means. The last of these by my accounting was over desegregation, which was resolved with the President ordering the Army to force the recalcitrant states to comply. Before that was a showdown between the New Deal Congress and the Supreme Court, which the former won by credibly threatening to pack the latter (which is IMO a much less severe crisis but still more substantial than anything happening today). However, that was almost a century ago, and Congress has not been that coherent lately.

I would think the latest one where SCOTUS ruled that the president was a king except in matters where the SCOTUS decides they aren't counts as a constitutional crisis.

Constitutional crises are not a matter of opinion but of occurrence, arising from an actual power conflict between arms of the government that is caused by a conflicted reading of the constitutional text. Basically, if the system just ticks on, it's not a constitutional crisis.

If "I think this is a very bad decision" was cause for a constitutional crisis, any state with more than three digit population would be in constitutional crisis perpetually.

> Constitutional crises are not a matter of opinion but of occurrence, arising from an actual power conflict between arms of the government that is caused by a conflicted reading of the constitutional text. Basically, if the system just ticks on, it's not a constitutional crisis.

This happened as recently as 2021-01-06; strong evidence that the military subverted the president to call the National Guard into Washington DC and secure the electoral count.

That's close. Both the excessively long lame duck period (2 months for Congress and 2.5 months for the President) and disunity between the President and the rest of the executive branch have also been fodder for crises in the past (Marbury v Madison, Andrew Johnson's impeachment).

If Trump didn't back down it could have definitely been a constitutional crisis.

I'd say it was narrowly averted though.

That is how the SC used to work: they would decide cases on the narrowest possible grounds. If they don't have to decide a tough question, but they can finesse it with something simpler, good enough. More recently they have been willing to tear up decades of established law on a regular basis.

"Used to work"... this was 2021.

And generally courts/judges just choose the scope of their legal opinions based on how far reaching they want the legal principles to apply.

IMHO, copyright-ability of APIs is so far away from their political agenda that they probably just decided to leave the issue on a cliffhanger...

Yes, "used to". Now, in 2024, the same supreme court has decided that presidents have immunity in all official acts, from stealing documents, up to and including assassination attempts on their opponents. This is a radical shift in how the court operates.

This "opponent assassination" hypothetical gets bandied about a lot but I have not seen any evidence that any court considers that to be an "official act". Official acts are constrained to legitimate exercises of constitutional authority and are not merely anything a President (or especially, an ex-President) does.

It's specifically mentioned in the dissents.

The dissents, not the opinion

the only thing radical is the opinions of people you are listening to if you believe SCOTUS enabled legally sanctioned assassinations. It was political hyperbole based on nothing, and it worked (with you). Think for yourself.

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