Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 409 posts

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#161

Post by grellas »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #149
igravious wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, your comment doesn't even fit in its entirety into my browser window without scrolling. :) For posterity you may want to edit "No one has a stake is seeing that Oracle be awarded $9", I'm not sure how to parse that. I didn't find any other typos or grammar mistakes which is pretty amazing for a chunk of prose of that length (at least it is for me.) Don't know why you're being downvoted for giving such a comprehe…

Effort for effort is eye for an eye fallacy. The OP seems to make some mistakes of fact. The decision was not Alsup's, but the jury's finding of fact: Google's use is fair even if API's are copyrightable (Alsup believed they weren't). For the quote you don't understand, I believe the mistake is only in a single character, 'is' should be 'in' (to which I present Larry Ellison as the central counter-example).

Thanks, I corrected the typo.

As to the first round that occurred 4 years ago, the decision was Judge Alsup's. Here is my analysis of that decision at that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4050490#up_4051761

Of course, in the verdict that just came down, the decision was that of the jury's and, yes, Google's use is fair even if API's are copyrightable - that is what fair use means.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#162

Post by farcical_tinpot »

tostitos1979 wrote: post #125

Despite the win, I think it would have been far better for the computer industry if Google had bought Sun. Unlike other companies with crap (IMHO ... Nokia, Motorola), Sun actually had stuff of value. This is a lesson that geeks get but I'm not sure MBAs do or will ever get.

I often wondered why Google didn't. Simply owning Java alone and heading off this inevitable nonsense would have been enough reason. This kind of legal stuff is really the only way Sun were going to make money from Java. Heaven knows, Java has continued in spite of Sun, not because of them.

The trouble is, they would have had to keep a lot of legacy crap going like Solaris and SPARC which probably wouldn't have appealed to them. Sun was, and still is, haemorrhaging cash.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#163

Post by lallysingh »

xyzzy4 wrote: post #142
davis wrote: post #104

If you found Sarah's coverage of the trial useful, she is accepting payments on PayPal since she was doing it with her own money: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/731687243916529665

It costs her money to post on Twitter?

I think it cost her money to not be working while covering the case.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#164

Post by jdmichal »

farcical_tinpot wrote: post #123
jdmichal wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it would necessarily get messy. Remember that appellate court does not accept new facts. The judges reviewing the case will do so based entirely on the facts found during the trial case and make a ruling. The only thing they would need to rule on is whether a particular fact was weighted properly by the jury. Remember, jury members are not expected to be experts of law; that's the judge's realm. So it…

The only thing they would need to rule on is whether a particular fact was weighted properly by the jury. Good luck with that here.

You are presenting a very cynical view of the justice system and judges without any reasoning backing your claim. "Good luck with that" is not really a valid debatable response.

There's a huge backlog of fair-use cases for them to base their decision on. I don't think it would be particularly difficult or nasty in this case, given that the ability to copyright APIs was a presumed fact during the trial. Also, the judges do not all need to agree; majority vote wins. So the moment they feel that further debate is unproductive, it's time to vote and move on.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#165

Post by phasmantistes »

xyzzy4 wrote: post #142
davis wrote: post #104

If you found Sarah's coverage of the trial useful, she is accepting payments on PayPal since she was doing it with her own money: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/731687243916529665

It costs her money to post on Twitter?

As I understand it, she was taking unpaid leave from her day-job at Vice Motherboard (despite then producing full-length articles for Motherboard on the topic).

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#166

Post by farcical_tinpot »

monocasa wrote: post #143
farcical_tinpot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Samba never copied anything. The interoperability argument was simple. Google wanted to use a language that was familiar to most and where developers could take existing code and port trivially. There are developer tools on the market that have done that for decades. Davlik isn't drop-in compa…

> Samba never copied anything. According to this case, they did.

Nope. Not sure where you're getting that from.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#167

Post by dragonwriter »

farcical_tinpot wrote: post #119
gpm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google didn't base their implementation on OpenJDK, even if they had they didn't follow the terms in the GPL so (given it was copyrightable and not fair use) this wouldn't be a defence.

This is irrelevant. There was a ridiculous notion going around a while back that if Oracle lost then the GPL would become unenforceable. The GPL does not depend on copyrightable APIs, and says nothing about what Oracle is trying to argue. Linking to a library and merely using an API are two different things. The GPL depends on the former and says the latter is neither here nor there.

> The GPL does not depend on copyrightable APIs

True in terms of the GPL as such, but the FSFs interpretation that the GPL applies to works that link, even dynamically, to a GPL covered work, which it holds to be derivative works, depends absolutely on the API presented by a library being a copyright-protected element (it also probably can't stand even then without an extremely narrow interpretation of "fair use".)

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #140
rayiner wrote: post #12

These are the statutory fair use factors the jury was required to consider (17 U.S.C. 107): (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential…

Who thinks APIs should be protectable? That's thought crime.

Oracle, Inc., and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, clearly.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#170

Post by zerocrates »

gpm wrote: post #112
zerocrates wrote: post #63

See, as ever, Florian Mueller for a... different perspective: http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/oracle-v-google-jury-find...

Out of curiosity, do we know if he is still being payed for this?

At least according to the man himself, he's not (at least not directly).

> As you can see, this blog's Oracle v. Google anti-unfair trial campaign--not affiliated with any party in any way whatsoever--is continuing.

Post reply on HN