Crypto Copycats Beware: Fair Use of Financial Technology in Wake of Oracle v. Google

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Publication year: 2018
• Citation: Vol. 1 No. 6

Joseph A. Farco and John E. Viskocil^*

The authors of this article discuss the impacts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's decision in Oracle, which are significant and will have a lasting impact across the technology industry, including in the financial technology segment, where emergent financial platforms often have a relationship with the open source community.

FinTech companies beware: your use of code that was originally developed via open source methods may not be shielded from future copyright infringement claims by the fair use doctrine. Recently, in Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC,¹ the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided that the doctrine of fair use did not protect Google from liability when during development of its mobile Android platform it selectively copied the structure, sequence, and organization of Java source code. Specifically, Google copied Application Programming Interface, or "API," packages built using Oracle's Java language, appended onto them Google's own implementing code, and sold the combined code for use in Google's Android operating system. While Oracle made its Java programming language open and free for anyone to use (e.g., an "open source" license), such use required Google to contribute back its innovations to the public, which Google did not do.²

Impacts of Oracle

The impacts of Oracle are significant and will have a lasting impact across the technology industry, including in the financial technology ("FinTech") segment, where emergent financial platforms often have a relationship with the open source community. Surging platforms such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, InterPlanetary File Systems, Monzo, Aragon, and Humaniq have origins in or a connection with open source development, whether for the platforms

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themselves or for interlinking companion software products. As critical financial technology projects continue to be open sourced, particularly with further developments in blockchain technology, additional companies will further contribute and reap the benefits from this community software development through the copying and refining of open sourced code. By sampling some or all of these community data sources, these companies very likely will build their own proprietary platforms such as new cryptocurren-cies, payment networks, collateral assignments tracking, or other financial transaction systems.

However, the massive impact these technologies will have on the existing...