Rules are provided to address the interplay of annotations and inheritance in the JAVA programming language. Class-level annotations affect the class they annotate and members of the class they annotate. Class-level annotations do not affect a class member declared by a superclass. If a class member carries a specific member-level annotation, an annotation of the same type implied by a class-level annotation is ignored. An interface implemented by a class does not contribute annotations to the implementing class or members of the implementing class. Class members inherited from a superclass, that are neither hidden nor overridden, maintain the annotations they had in the class that declared them. Member-level annotations on class members inherited from a superclass, that are either hidden or overridden, are ignored. Interface-level annotations affect the interface they annotate and all members of the interface they annotate, including inherited members.