Abstract

Google’s recent victory over Oracle before the US Supreme Court was indeed a major win for the Alphabet company. Some argue that this win is dwarfed by the decision’s significance to the software industry as whole. API are essential software building blocks and their legal monopolisation may have far-reaching ramifications for the wellbeing of the software industry. In this guest lecture we will examine the nature of APIs and the role they play in software building landscape, as well as the Oracle vs Google legal dispute in its numerous iterations, culminating in the Supreme Court decision. Finally, we will evaluate the manner in which a similar dispute may be adjudicated and decided upon before an EU court applying EU copyright jurisprudence. The latter hypothetical exercise may be of special interest particularly since the American fair use doctrine has no application under EU law.

Speaker profile

Professor Noam Shemtov holds a Chair in  Intellectual Property and Technology Law in the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, at Queen Mary University of London. He lectures in areas of intellectual property, creative industries and technology and his research interests are also focused in these fields.

Noam has led research projects and studies funded by UK Research Councils and by industry, national, supranational and commercial organizations, such as HSRC, CISAC, Microsoft, WIPO, European Patent Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the European Space Agency.

Noam also holds visiting appointments by Spanish,  Dutch and French universities, where he lectures regularly in areas pertaining to intellectual property, Technology and Creative Industries. He is a qualified solicitor both in the UK and in Israel.