The resurfacing of the Oracle Google court case this week is pretty unwelcome in software circles. The second Jury trial, completed in 2016, reached a pretty straightforward conclusion, that an API is not copyrightable, so case dismissed. What Google had done, perhaps rather cheekily, was to embed 37 separate API calls to Java programming. In the past this has been universally seen as fine and there are no precedents which suggest this requires a paid for license. But an appeals court judge, looking at it with the hindsight that by doing this it gave Google a bit of a time advantage in its Android go to market strategy, has said that actually API’s are copyrightable. So this is not Google…