Today the Supreme Court resolved a decade of copyright litigation by supporting interoperability and openness, ruling that reimplementing an API by copying its declarations is legal fair use, even (or perhaps especially) when you’re building a competitive service. This was a case of two massive companies – Oracle and Google – fighting over Java, Android, and billions of dollars. But it was also about the quintessential user’s right and one of crucial importance to libraries: fair use. And after last year’s Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org decision, it has become the latest in a long line of Supreme Court decisions broadly supportive of fair use.

In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court held that Google’s copying of many declarations associated with the Java SE API (including only those lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program with their own implementing code) was a fair use of that material as a matter of law. That means that this ruling applies to all APIs, not just the one at issue here.

“This decision is a win for the Open Web. In our digital world, businesses, nonprofits, libraries and individual developers use APIs everyday,” says Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive’s founder and Internet Hall of Famer. “We have seen copyright used as a tool to create enclosures and walled gardens. But the Court was clear: copyright cannot be used to harm the public interest.”

Importantly, the Court held that reimplementing the Java API was fair use even though Google copied the material intentionally. That fact actually supported a finding of fair use. That’s because Google’s purpose was “to allow programmers to work in a different computing environment without discarding a portion of a familiar programming language.” Put another way, Google’s actions were in support of interoperability. And fair use protects it.

In contrast, Oracle sought to profit from the developers’ familiarity by locking them into its own environment and forcing Google to pay for a license–what the Court described as a “tax”–in order to access it. The Court held this kind of “tax”, in derogation of interoperability, did not further the goals of copyright. That was because, it explained, copyright seeks to incentivize the creation of new works. Incentivizing the creation of new works was deemed more important than allowing for the monopolization of aspects of the old. That was particularly true here, where Google copied these lines of code not because of their “creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.” Enforcing copyright in these circumstances “risks causing creativity-related harms to the public,” frustrating the goals of copyright.

While many hoped that the Court would rule directly on the question of software copyrightability, which may have more squarely helped small projects take on goliaths, this ruling remains a very good thing. It is a win for interoperability, a win for fair use, and a win for the open principles that form the foundation of so much of the internet today.

“We have to wonder whether a system that took ten years and tens of million dollars worth of litigation to reach this outcome reflects a copyright system that is as fair as we need it to be,” says Brewster Kahle. “Today, thank goodness the fair use system was reaffirmed. This decision will have broad, positive benefits for openness, innovation and competition.”

Fans of science fiction learned last week that the word “robot” was first used in 1920—a full three years earlier than originally thought.

The “massively important yet obvious” change in date was confirmed with a search of the Internet Archive, which has a digitized first edition of the Czech play, R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots, published in 1920. There on the title page, hiding in plain sight in an English-language subtitle to the work, is the earliest known use of the word “robot.”

This important piece of information is one of many little-known facts captured in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. The project was completed this year by historian Jesse Sheidlower, who credits two things that enabled him to publish this project, decades in the making.  “One, we had a pandemic so I had a lot of enforced time at home that I could spend on it,” explained Sheidlower. “The second was the existence of the Internet Archive. Because it turns out the Internet Archive has the Pulp Magazine collection that holds almost all the science fiction pulps from this core period.”

The New York-based lexicographer—a person who compiles dictionaries—sat down with the Internet Archive’s Director of Partnerships, Wendy Hanamura, to demonstrate how he goes about his work.

The comprehensive, online dictionary includes not only definitions, but also how nearly 1,800 sci-fi terms were first used, and their context over time. From “actifan” to “zine,” the historical evolution of the core vocabulary of science fiction is now online, linked to original sources in the Internet Archive and beyond.  

The project began nearly twenty years ago at Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as the Science Fiction Citations Project. The idea was that science fiction fans would send in references from  mid-20^th century pop culture materials that weren’t otherwise archived in libraries. Back then, volunteers mailed in citations they found in books and magazines, and moderators entered the details into a database of these crowdsourced references. In 2007, the project resulted in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff Prutcher.

Sheidlower moved on from the OED in 2013. But the potential of this dictionary of science fiction never left him. Sheidlower’s vision was to make the resource even more useful to the public by completing the work and offering it for free use. In 2020, OED gave him permission to dive back in. Working from home during the pandemic, the editor discovered the Internet Archive had a rich Pulp Magazine collection that he could tap into from his desk in New York.

“Instead of hoping that someone, somewhere might have something and send it in, I could just search at the Archive. It made research much easier,” Sheidlower says. He then linked any piece of information cited to the original sources online—providing readers with an avenue for more details to keep reading.

In January, the first public version of the dictionary was made available via a new website, built by Sheidlower. 

Because it is in a digital format, readers can search for terms—such as “transporter” or “hyperspace”—and be directed to the entry, complete with quotes and links to click through to the original source where it first appeared. There are also hundreds of pending entries that are being considered for inclusion in the dictionary, which is a living document that can be updated in response to reader suggestions, Sheidlower says.

Response so far to the revised dictionary has been positive from readers and the media. “I hope that the dictionary is of broad interest to anyone,” Sheidlower says. “Anyone, almost anywhere, can have access to the same kind of resources now. You don’t need to have people physically in libraries reading through absolutely everything, you can do a lot of searching online. The barrier to entry for this kind of research is reduced. Anyone can make contributions.”

Sheidlower comes to this work with a background studying in the classics, linguistics, Latin and the history of the English language. He worked in the dictionary department at Random House, before moving to the OED.  Sheidlower also does language consulting for television shows such as Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,”  to ensure that expressions being used match the historical period.

For a long time, we’ve felt that the growing, diverse, global community interested in building the decentralized Web needed an entry point. A portal into the events, concepts, voices, and resources critical to moving the Decentralized Web forward.

This is why we created, getdweb.net, to serve as a portal, a welcoming entry point for people to learn and share strategies, analysis, and tools around how to build a decentralized Web.

It began at DWeb Camp 2019, when designer Iryna Nezhynska of Jolocom led a workshop to imagine what form that portal should take. Over the next 18 months, Iryna steered a dedicated group of DWeb volunteers through a process to create this new website. If you are new to the DWeb, it should help you learn about its core concepts. If you are a seasoned coder, it should point you to opportunities nearby. For our nine local nodes, it should be a clearinghouse and archive for past and future events.

Above all, the new website was designed to clearly state the principles we believe in as a community, the values we are trying to build right into the code.

At our February DWeb Meetup, our designer Iryna took us on a tour of the new website and the design concepts that support it.

Then John Ryan and I (Associate Producer of DWeb Projects) shared the first public version of the Principles of the DWeb and described the behind-the-scenes process that went into developing them. It was developed in consultation with dozens of community members, including technologists, organizers, academics, policy experts, and artists. These DWeb Principles are a starting point, not an end point — open for iteration.

As stewards, we felt that we needed to crystallize the shared vision of this community, to demonstrate how and why we are building a Decentralized Web. Our aim is to identify our guiding principles through discussion and distill them into a living document that we can point to. It is to create a set of practical guiding values as we design and build the Web of the future.

Quote from Behind the Scenes of the Decentralized Web Principles

You can watch the video of the event, including the presentation about the new website and the first public version of the DWeb Principles below.