Driven by the rise of e-commerce, social media, cloud services and now the Internet of Things (IoT), application programming interfaces (APIs) have become pivotal to our economy and personal Internet use.
Following the recent decision in Google v. Oracle in the US, Lindsay takes a look at the intellectual property (IP) and contractual protection of APIs in the EU.
A key legal debate is whether APIs can be made subject to copyright protection. “The fact that the US fair use limitation is not recognised as such under EU law means that the permission of the copyright holder is needed in order to use copyright-protected APIs.” says Lindsay.
You can read the article here.