From protocol:

And there’s one wild card that could change everything with respect to how AWS, its customers and its partners interoperate: the outcome of the Oracle vs. Google case, said Charles Duan, a senior fellow at R Street. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering Google’s appeal of two lower-court rulings that upheld Oracle’s position that APIs are subject to copyright, which could dramatically alter the software-development landscape.

“If that litigation goes in Oracle’s favor, Amazon potentially has a very powerful way of stopping competitors from making compatible APIs,” Duan said, referring to how several companies ( including Oracle) have reimplemented the API for the widely used S3 storage service. “I think the case just sort of exposes this longstanding question of, we’ve just sort of assumed we live in a world where we don’t have to worry about people asserting rights over all these sorts of things.”

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