Michael Shore

On January 6, 2020, Google submitted its brief in Google v. Oracle, kicking off the Supreme Court case that many are calling the “copyright case of the decade.” The suit pits the search engine platform controlling 93% of the worldwide search market against Oracle, the owner of the ubiquitous Java program, which submitted its response brief last week. After attempting and failing to secure the rights to Java, Google decided to cease negotiating and instead replicated 37 API packages from the copyrighted program, a decision that precipitated the years-long lawsuit. 

Banana Republics are societies characterized by their starkly stratified social classes and a ruling-class plutocracy composed of the business, political and military elites. The Elites rule over a servile government that abets and supports, for kickbacks and bribes, the exploitation of the rest of society. Instead of Dole and United Fruit controlling Honduras, we now have Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other tech giants controlling Congress and the Executive Branch through unlimited lobbying by groups like the Internet Association[1], High Tech Inventors Alliance[2], the Software Alliance[3], Unified Patents[4] and through direct political donations. As demonstrated below, the only difference between Honduras in 1904 and the United States today is that the new bananas are smartphones and the software they contain.