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Dr. John Gathegi Presents Keynote Speech to the 10th International Conference on Information Capital, Property, and Ethics

On June 4th, 2021, Dr. John Gathegi presented his keynote speech, "Google v. Oracle: Fair Use, Copyrightability, or Both?", to the 10th International Conference on Information Capital, Property, and Ethics. It touched on the April 5, 2021 opinion by the United States Supreme Court on a case brought by Oracle against Google, alleging copyright violation of its Java SE computer platform owned at the time by Sun Microsystems (the pre-cursor to Oracle). Google had copied some lines of code from the platform’s Application Programming Interface (API) tool. In the opinion, the Court had an opportunity to expand on the copyrightability of computer programming code, but instead opted to assume copyrightability and proceeded to conduct a four-factor fair use analysis. Google is a major IT player not just in the United States but in the rest of the world, thus the issues raised here could have a wide-ranging potential impact. 

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School of Information students, alumni, and faculty can submit news of accomplishments and events for our News section. We welcome announcements of publications, works presented, jobs procured, awards garnered, scholarships awarded, graduate school placements, and upcoming events.