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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

#211

Post by DannyBee »

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…

This is 100% inaccurate

Copyright law was created as a way to support a nascent publishing industry by granting it a monopoly. It was not created to help artists or whoever. http://questioncopyright.org/promise

(The history here is accurate and can be verified with other independent sources)

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

#212

Post by gnoway »

farcical_tinpot wrote: post #58
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…

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…

If you automatically throw out cases, what's the point of having a law enabling and encouraging those cases in the first place? Or maybe a better question is: what would legitimate infringement look like, if what Google did is fair use?

I don't know if APIs should be subject to copyright or not. I certainly don't want them to be. But since APIs have been found copyrightable, it's hard to understand how this wasn't open and shut for Oracle.

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

#213

Post by sounds »

throwawaykeno wrote: post #34
koolba wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Under the Copyright Act, the judge has discretion to award attorney fees to the prevailing party. [0] I think that'd be good for the ecosystem as it'd send a message that there will be consequence for pursuing frivolous lawsuits.

I don't think it's fair to call this law suit frivolous. From a developer perspective, the ideal and just end result has always seemed rather obvious. However, the multi-year history of this case demonstrates the correct legal answer not so obvious, at least from a legal perspective. For example, settling the issue on fair use was definitely not how most people thought/hoped this would shake out way back in the begin…

This law suit is frivolous based on the assumption that APIs are not copyrightable (a very reasonable assumption in 2009).

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

#214

Post by zaroth »

rayiner wrote: post #198
nl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samba is API compatible with Windows file server. Unless you are arguing that network protocol compatibility is a different thing? It seems to me that there is a lot of overlap, since Samba relies on re implementing the same behavior as a Windows file server.

Copyright doesn't care about the software's behavior, just the text and structure of the code. Samba implemented CIFS without looking at or copying any Microsoft code.

This is such a key point and yet also quite confusing. Obviously copyright is not patents. Copyright is about preventing literal copying of someone's creation.

So.., if you implement an API in a different programming language, such that the text and structure is different, and yet the function remains the same... then have you not infringed any copyright?

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

#215

Post by oceanswave »

dragonwriter wrote: post #110
halo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If other countries follow USSC's lead in declaring APIs as copyrightable, many of which have far looser fair use rights than the US, then this could create a lot of headaches, especially since this seems like a very loose interpretation of the US's already loose fair-use laws.

The USSC hasn't ruled on copyrightability (they still might in this case, and it's anyone's guess how they would.)

The proper acronym is SCOTUS.

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

#216

Post by majormajor »

appleflaxen wrote: post #160
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…

People complain about the special interests, but some fail to realize that the major backers of Extreme Copyright (TM) are a special interest that we created. We, the US public, out of the goodness of our hearts and wanting to foster art, gave up our right to "repeat what we heard" (copying, when what you hear is digital) in return for incentives to create art. And then bam ; decades later the incentives are the de f…

> I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts. Fewer Kany Wests. Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Those are such small consequences that, to be honest, they might be additional benefits.

Most of the public would consider those pretty enormous consequences.

Heck, I'd be upset if I had to switch away from a MacBook Pro to a commodity-PC-hardware + Linux solution for personal use today, even without any of the other things that group of people and companies you mention have produced. And I'm a-ok with paying for those things, or paying other people for doing interesting things on top of those things.

Maybe you think the risk of that actually happening is pretty small, but as-written, the consequences are actually pretty huge.

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

#217

Post by Natanael_L »

Silhouette wrote: post #210
Natanael_L wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. Just like how a modern society built around horses and carts with all the overhead and work that would require wouldn't be an improvement.

It seems to me that it is very very rare that it is the copyright enforcement and/or necessity (will) to stay within legal limits that itself is the reason any given copyrighted offer stays profitable. People pays because they want to pay for quality, in general.

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

#218

Post by comex »

brianwawok wrote: post #194
rayiner wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Was it so bad back when you could just buy software for money? Before business models built on eyeballs and data mining instead of copyright?

Like when windows extended Java then started adding incompatibile methods to the windows Java extension that would be on all windows computers? Or maybe when office used a hidden format to store files so no one could share files without buying a license? They were not great times at all...

It's interesting to compare those two examples in the context of the present copyright controversy. In the Visual J++ case, obviously Sun having copyright control over all Java reimplementations would have given them more leverage than just the trademark (though they were able to kill J++ with what they had).

But in the case of proprietary file formats, or really any non-crypto-based attempt to hinder interoperability, the less control, the better. For example, Microsoft could have hypothetically designed their DOC format for the explicit purpose of creating legal issues, such as by having files consist of a series of API calls to reconstruct the document (like WMF!), so that anyone parsing the document would have to reimplement the APIs. To be fair, the need to do so for actual compatibility would weigh heavily in favor of fair use, whereas the story with Android is somewhat weaker (especially because nobody seems to have told the Federal Circuit that Android actually is compatible with existing Java libraries, rather than the API copying being solely for the sake of programmer familiarity...) Also, there is no real need to use copyright for this purpose in the first place: patents have been shown to be quite effective in locking down file formats (c.f. H.264, x86 instructions) - and don't have fair use - so arguably copyright gives offenders nothing they couldn't achieve by other means. But then, patents are limited-duration and who knows, maybe the law with respect to them will be improved some day. No need to hand out extra tools.

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

#219

Post by wtallis »

phasmantistes wrote: post #177
davidw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll admit to not really understanding the path this has taken through the courts - I haven't been following that closely though.

A short summary: * Oracle sues Google on copyright grounds. * Case is overseen by Judge Alsup, who taught himself Java in order to understand the technical merits of the case. Case is split into two phases: copyright and patents. * A jury finds Google to be infringing on copyright, but deadlocks on the fair-use defense. The jury finds Google to be non-infringing on all patents. * Judge Alsup breaks the jury's deadloc…

The Federal Circuit isn't the Ninth Circuit, and that's really the whole problem. The Federal Circuit is the special-purpose patent appeals court. For a case like this where they were hearing the appeal because there were patent claims, they are supposed to treat the non-patent issues in the manner of the local circuit (9th).

The Federal Circuit has a history of ruling in favor of broader intellectual property rights and being periodically reined in by the Supreme Court. They do it for patents, and when Oracle uses a losing patent claim to get copyright issues before the Federal Circuit, they rule for expanding copyright. If Oracle hadn't included patent claims, the appeal would have gone before the Ninth Circuit and probably lost. The Federal Circuit did a farcical job of applying Ninth Circuit copyright precedent, especially in contrast to the thorough job Alsup did.

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

#220

Post by Silhouette »

Natanael_L wrote: post #217
Silhouette wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. Just like how a modern society built around horses and carts with all the overhead and work that would require wouldn't be an improvement. It seems to me that it is very very rare that it is the copyright enforcement and/or necessity (will) to stay within legal limits that itself is the reason any given copyrighted offer stays profitable. People pays because they want…

Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit.

I'm arguing that copyright-supported creative effort overall produces and distributes significantly more and significantly better works than creative effort supported in other ways.

If that doesn't imply societal benefit to you, what does?

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