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

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

#201

Post by wtallis »

Natanael_L wrote: post #187
eganist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing s…

That's not a sufficient answer. The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how? Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?

> The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation.

It looks to me like he's only claiming that copyright protections mitigate a specific harm, not that they're necessarily a net benefit.

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

#202

Post by gnoway »

nl wrote: post #189
lmm wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaME had existed for years. There were a few very good apps (Google Maps was great, as was the Facebook app). Given that even the cheapest phones included it I can't imagine Sun was making any money off it.

It was a major source of licensing revenue for Sun, and one of the main reasons why historically they had been reluctant to open source Java. They were making around $200M revenue from it in 2007, which was the major source of income for their software business.

I thought this part of an Ars Technica article[0] on the trial was pretty telling:

"On cross-exam, a Google attorney brought up a graph from an internal presentation by Brenner showing "aggressive" and "conservative" estimates of what would happen to Java licensing revenue from 2007 to 2010. The graph's "aggressive" line showed a decline from around $140 million per year to about $105 million, and the "conservative" line showed a decline from the same starting point to around $50 million.

The graph was created before the launch of Android. Google's point was clear: Java was in decline, Android or no Android—and its executives and salespeople knew it."

It doesn't really matter what the numbers were though. They would have been higher had Google paid Sun for a Java license.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/suns-head-of-java...

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

#203

Post by zaroth »

Natanael_L wrote: post #187
eganist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing s…

That's not a sufficient answer. The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how? Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?

I think you're moving the goalposts quite a bit here! The original assertion does not assume that the current implementation and interpretation of copyright law is, as you say, "proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation."

The complaint was that "that's not how facts work" but the statement in question was in fact verifiable.

If you want to provide proof of a better solution, go for it. Proof that there does not exist a better solution is logically impossible, so clearly not a reasonable request.

Were creative works shared, copied, and appropriated with impunity when it was perfectly legal to do so? Why, yes they were! Did the creatives lose out on monetary gains in those cases? Certainly. And copyright law evolved to solve that problem. You are perfectly free to believe it wasn't a problem in the first place, or that the medicine is worse than the disease, but I think you have to make the case for why creatives should not be paid for their work, or how else outside of market economies we should pay creatives for their work, if you believe that would be a better system.

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

#204

Post by Throwaway23412 »

xenihn wrote: post #171
cheald wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs her time, at a minimum, which comes at the opportunity cost of other money-making ventures.

She's strengthening her personal brand and potentially gaining access to new clients for future work. I have absolutely no problem with her asking for donations, but let's not be disingenuous :)

This is the first time I've seen "do it for the exposure" in the wild (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure). And you even called the other person disingenuous (albeit in jest). I'm impressed.

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

#205

Post by farcical_tinpot »

jdmichal wrote: post #178
farcical_tinpot wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as ridiculous as it sounds. There is simply no case at all where API use cannot be sensibly argued as fair use. That's why you use an API in the first place........ What privileges would such a copyright provide? In practice? None.

> There is simply no case at all where API use cannot be sensibly argued as fair use. An API being used by a client and an API being copied by a competitor to be used by those same clients are two completely different situations.

Nope, they aren't, or at the very least, the difference between them is as to be indistinguishable. That's what the jury decided here.

Using API and the word 'copied' in the same sentence simply doesn't mean anything.

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

#206

Post by sounds »

guelo wrote: post #172
grellas wrote: post #120

Law evolves and the law of copyright in particular is ripe for "disruption" - and I say this not as one who opposes the idea of copyright but, on the contrary, as one who strongly supports it. It is right that the author of a creative work get protection for having conceived that work and reduced it to tangible form. Developers do this all the time with their code. So too do many, many others. Many today disagree wit…

> The Bono law may have slipped through Congress with nary a dissent in its day but this will not happen again, whatever the lobbying power of Disney and others. Copyright maximalists realizing this have moved to circumvent democracy globally by enshrining their most draconian laws into "free trade" treaties. These treaties have the proven ability to overturn the will of national democratic bodies and are almost impo…

And "free trade" treaties also have the convenient feature that they can be used for far more than just copyright. It's criminal.

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

#207

Post by c_c_c »

rplnt wrote: post #92
phasmantistes wrote: post #3

I'd also just like to give huge props to Sarah Jeong for keeping up such a high-quality live stream of tweets over the course of the entire trial. That's reporting done right.

> tweets > reporting done right I'm not sure. Surely it would only benefit her if she weren't limited by 140 characters, right?

No. You're allowed more than 140 characters because you can tweet more than once. The real time updates were invaluable.

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

#208

Post by thyrsus »

eganist wrote: post #180
erikpukinskis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would That's not how facts work. You can't say "it is a fact that [hypothetical scenario] leads to [expected outcome]" except in the case of very well understood mechanisms narrowly applied. I don't think the sociopolitical effects of copyright law are one of those situations.

"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing s…

[Citation needed]

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

#209

Post by dekhn »

phillmv wrote: post #153
xyzzy4 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Maybe her employers allowed it.

She's a freelancer, as are a lot of journalists. She said so herself: takes time away from paid projects.

To the doubters: I'd take her at her word because she's self-brand building and she has a lot to lose if somebody catches her in a trivial lie.

I thought her tweets on the trial were absurd (in the literature sense).

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

#210

Post by Silhouette »

Natanael_L wrote: post #187
eganist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing s…

That's not a sufficient answer. The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how? Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?

Proving that there's no better solution is impractical.

However, the size of the copyright-backed creative industries today, by any reasonable metric I can think of, is vastly greater than the size of the creative industries built around the alternative models that have been tried noticeably often so far. That seems to include all of volunteer-based, crowd-funded, mass donation-funded, traditional patronage where some wealthy benefactor funds an entire work, and pay-what-you-want models.

Likewise, the quality of work produced with the economic incentive of copyright tends to be better, often much better, than what is produced based on other funding models or a voluntary basis, particularly in areas that aren't things anyone is likely to do just for fun. (Some people may disagree, but I consider this point so obvious by now that it's rarely worth engaging on.)

That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far, and it's readily falsifiable if anyone does in the future.

Patents are a different matter. I suspect the pros and cons vary significant from one field of research to another, with the general trend that patents might be useful in fields where the cost of R&D really is prohibitively high without some reliable way to exploit any successful projects, while patents are probably doing more harm than good in fields where they are more often used for sneaky legal manoeuvres than to incentivize genuinely innovative, widely useful, but expensive work.

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