Commentary In the early days of software, those against patenting software argued that copyright protection would suffice. They got their wish with the Supreme Court’s decision in Alice v. CLS Bank (pdf) that effectively made software unpatentable. The recent decision in Oracle v. Google (pdf) gave a big win to Google and effectively makes software uncopyrightable, too. Who gains from this? Big Tech. Who loses? Individual software innovators and entrepreneurs. In its Alice decision, the Supreme Court explicitly stated that software is patentable but then went on to describe as unpatentable any invention that had the characteristics of software. Similarly, in the Google decision, the court said that software is copyrightable but there are “fair use” exceptions. They then went on to describe how to claim this exception for virtually any copied software. At issue was the code for application program interfaces (“APIs”), which are like the names and addresses …