The court acknowledged the nature of a work in Google LLC v. Oracle. That’s Reed.

[*1431] The Supreme Court's majority opinion in Google LLC v. Oracle Inc. seems to indicate the Court's movement toward such an approach. There the court attempted to analyze the nature of a presumably copyrightable "user interface" created for computer programmers. 287 Instead of merely categorizing the computer code in question as a "literary work," or even a "computer program" - two terms defined by the Copyright Act 288 - and granting greater protection to it against unauthorized uses, the court looked instead to the ontological nature of the work, examining what the work is from within the work's creative environment. First, the court examined the inputs and outputs that created the interface, including the different kinds of computer code that made up the interface and the kinds of programming (creative, problem-solving vs. more functional or organizational) necessary to produce each component. 289 Second, the Court spent considerable space describing how the user interface functions within the creative environment for computer programming. It found that the code at issue effectively acted as a system of "file cabinets, drawers, and files" for programmers, organized with labels that "would prove intuitively easy to remember." 290 Finally, the court examined the value of the work to the creative environment for computer programming. It noted that the value of the code in question derived not necessarily from the creative investments of the authors of the user interface, but from users of the interface who invested their time learning how to use the code's various commands and who continued to use it to create new programs. 291