copying. Some relevant court decisions allow for reverse-engineering to discover ideas that are not subject to copyright within a protected program. The ideas can be implemented in a competing program as long as the developers do not copy the original expression. With a clean room design approach one team of engineers derives a functional specification from the original code, and then a second team uses that specification to design and build the new code. This was piloted in the mid-1980s by a team from Phoenix Technologies to produce a BIOS functionally equivalent to that of the IBM Personal Computer without infringing on IBM's copyright. In August 2010 Oracle Corporation initiated a lawsuit against Google claiming a combination of patent and copyright violations related to Google's implementation of the Java programming language in Google's Android operating system. On May 7, 2012 a jury decided that Google had infringed the SSO copyright of 37 Java Application programming interface (API) packages, but were unable to decide whether this was fair use. The judge asked both Google and Oracle to provide further detail of their positions over whether an API or a programming language such as Java can be copyrighted. He also asked for both sides to comment on a ruling by the European Court of Justice in a similar case that found "Neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not enjoy copyright protection." On May 31, 2012 the judge ruled that "So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API." In reviewing the Oracle v. Google case history, the court noted: References Notes Citations Sources Computer law United States copyright law