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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

#361

Post by ChrisLomont »

DannyBee wrote: post #357
ChrisLomont wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Using Wikipedia as an authoritative source... Which is why you can check the references. When the article linked above about copyright is clearly coming from an anti-copyright source, and does not mention multiple important things Wikipedia does, I think any intelligent person realizes the Wikipedia source is more credible. As to overall accuracy of Wikipedia, many, many studies show it is quite accurate. Google and…

"Which is why you can check the references. When the article linked above about copyright is clearly coming from an anti-copyright source, and does not mention multiple important things Wikipedia does, I think any intelligent person realizes the Wikipedia source is more credible. " You can also check the references from the article i cited. But apparently, those references are somehow wrong, and yours, somehow right,…

>You can also check the references from the article i cited.

The references are correct. They leave out significant parts of the story, as I stated.

You started with "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.". This is demonstrably false as shown above many times.

>I think any intelligent person realizes wikipedia is mostly astroturfed these days, and also usually represents popular opinion on things, not accurate history

Any intelligent person will look at the two sources, note differences, and note one has listed more evidence than the other. An intelligent person will also note one has a clear bias to present a certain viewpoint based on the site and single author. If there is still doubt, an intelligent person will investigate the extra evidence to ensure it's not simply made up. Then, when it is shown to be accurate, and that one source deliberately or accidentally left it out, the intelligent person will reverse his opinion as it was supplanted by more evidence.

>Note, the ones Karl is citing in his article are in much larger law journals, books on copyright history, etc. The things Wikipedia is citing are mostly pretty niche

This amuses me - Karl cites 4 sources (paper by Patterson, a book by Kaplan, and a book by Steinberg, and an online article by Schneier and Kelsey). Wikipedia cites 35 sources and 20 more for extra reading. The sources include over a dozen books from scholars top publishers (Harvard, Cambridge, Springer, more), and includes around two dozen authors, many of them fulltime copyright scholars.

That you spin this into your claim "much larger law journals" (you mean the single paper in your references?) and Wikipedia being "niche" is astoundingly dishonest.

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

#362

Post by coredog64 »

jerf wrote: post #228
toyg wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Clintons are famously close to Hollywood and have been quite bad for anti-copyright causes. One word: DMCA.

The law would come out of Congress. I have no compelling reason to believe at this time that any candidate for this Presidential election wouldn't just sign it and move on with life. (I can read tea leaves and hypothesize as well as anyone else, but I have no real facts that leads me to believe otherwise.) If that is the case, there's very little advantage to the industry getting close to the President; all they can…

This is not entirely true. Take, for example, No Child Left Behind. Bush made it an executive priority and partnered with senior members of Congress laying out what the law should look like. Same with Medicare Part D.

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

#363

Post by tripzilch »

deciplex wrote: post #263
brianwawok wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Was the hold Office format hidden? It was delightfully obtuse and even obfuscated IMO, no doubt about that, but not impenetrable, and you can find the docs describing the file format on Microsoft's site now . Could you not get them 10-15 years ago?

The prevailing idea seemed to be that if you wanted conversion of Word documents, let's say to screenshots, to match properly in all cases, the only way was a dedicated (or virtual) machine running Windows+Word and some VBS to automate the conversion.

I don't know if this is still the best way. LibreOffice has came a long way for sure, but still doesn't reproduce Word's layout perfectly (which is still the expectation).

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

#364

Post by doki_pen »

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…

I disagree that copyright is a natural right. It is a right that societies bestow to creators to incentive them to create. It has not valid purpose beyond that and is quite unnatural to me.Part of the problem with today's law is that it is being pushed as a natural right and a form of justice. This is a fairly recent development, historically speaking.

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

#365

Post by mratzloff »

glibgil wrote: post #306
wtallis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "They maintain and innovate on those projects at great cost to themselves." Net cost? Most certainly not. That's not how Oracle works at all. Saying that they aren't entirely opposed to participating in mutually beneficial arrangements is still setting the bar pretty damn low and is not a distinction worthy of any praise.

That's not how favors work. When someone does something nice for the engineering community you use it with gratitude (if you do use it). Oracle makes cool software. It doesn't cost anything to aknowledge it, but it sure makes you look like an ass to argue that they don't. So many people use vagrant right now and it just works because of VirtualBox. That's cool. No bar to clear. It's just nice that Oracle paid for tha…

Vagrant works with many other VMs as of version 1.1. Oracle didn't create VirtualBox, they bought it. I avoid using it, like I avoid depending on any Oracle-owned software. Especially if it means I would be obligated to thank them for it.

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

#366

Post by jb613 »

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…

> Patents are a different matter. ... 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

You seem to be suggesting that cost should be a deciding factor in whether to protect creative work. I disagree that there is a difference here between copyrights and patents.

1) In the tech industry, calculating the "cost" would be anything but straightforward. What would be allowed and what wouldn't? The players are not even comparable - what would stop a large corporation to include their HR, legal departments, and executive team as part of their "R&D costs"? Whereas, a small software startup with 1-3 members getting paid ramen noodles would be hard pressed to properly chalk up a tiny fraction of the costs the large corporation. The large corporation would have no problem showing that "project X cost $1million+ in R&D costs" while the startup would be in $thousands or $tens of thousands. If anything, one might argue that the OPPOSITE of cost would be better indicator - I see more innovation deserving protection from small startups creating things in a weekend than large corporations pushing some new technology developed over years using teams of people and resources.

2) There exist numerous examples where traditional artists create works in relatively short time. How many times have we read about an artist who wrote a song in an afternoon or even an hour? In those cases, the "R&D" costs of creating the song or painting would surely be considered small (if not tiny) when compared to tech R&D. It's contradictory to suggest that creative works protectable by copyrights at times with lower "costs" should be more protectable than tech protectable only by patents.

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

#367

Post by tripzilch »

Programmatic wrote: post #343
tajen wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would still buy a Macbook if patents and copyright did not exist, wouldn't you? In fact there are much more powerful designs in the PC world. But you stick to the Apple brand because you've been burnt with everything else, from cheap knock-offs to famous makers who distribute an OEM versions of Windows with viruses and rogue root CA certificates. What saves Apple is being the only make you can rely on. They're no…

Without copyright, anyone could make a knockoff Apple and it would dilute their brand so much as to make it unworkable for Apple to make a quality product and get paid for it. Apple absolutely requires copyright protection of their software to keep their brand exclusive to drive profit to keep making nice products. The PC world that you noted is the epitome of the race to the bottom they would have to participate in…

I disagree. The race to the bottom you observe with PCs is largely caused by the same lock-in forces enabled by strong copyright.

In your hypothetical example world, Linux would be on equal playing field when it comes to video/hardware drivers. So it could compete as a serious gaming platform. Without vendor lock-in, hardware would have to be more interchangeable, so can select their own choice of hardware, which can be cheap or expensive or powerful or quality or pretty etc and fit it inside an aluminium casing if they like. They could get a matte screen and a nice keyboard ...

Without Apple's market power behind it, nobody would consider using iTunes over a normal mp3 player.

There is demand for pretty computers, powerful ones, durable & sturdy ones, et cetera. That won't change without Apple. Sure it won't offer the exact same things Apple does today, but on the other hand it will provide a whole bunch of things that Apple today doesn't or won't. On the whole it will be neutral or positive.

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

#368

Post by tripzilch »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #361
DannyBee wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Which is why you can check the references. When the article linked above about copyright is clearly coming from an anti-copyright source, and does not mention multiple important things Wikipedia does, I think any intelligent person realizes the Wikipedia source is more credible. " You can also check the references from the article i cited. But apparently, those references are somehow wrong, and yours, somehow right,…

>You can also check the references from the article i cited. The references are correct. They leave out significant parts of the story, as I stated. You started with "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.". This is demonstrably false as shown above many times. >I think any intelligent person realizes wikipe…

Spinning "more evidence" into "better evidence" is just as stupid of a bias, IMHO. The only way is to consider evidence based in its own merits. But of course it's easier to count links and judge the size of names.

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

#369

Post by Zigurd »

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...

> Like when windows extended Java then started adding incompatibile methods

Visual J++ was a very usable Java. Had Sun failed to sue it out of existence, the world would have had a Java with a good UI stack developers actually used, an IDE that was not unusably slow and buggy, AND almost all packages built for Sun's Java would drop right in without problems. Visual J++ would have created the same effect on the use of Java that Android did, but it would have happened approximately 10 years earlier.

Sun's suit was tremendously destructive of a very useful product that would have helped the cause of Java's wide use. Unnecessary, spiteful, and an own-goal.

EDIT: And less VB, and more Windows applications software running in a managed language runtime, years earlier.

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

#370

Post by toyg »

gnaritas wrote: post #276
toyg wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all they can do is sign it The US legislative process lives and dies on building alliances and horse-trading. A word from the President and/or his/her promise of future help in other matters is hugely valuable . A law going through Congress and a law going through Congress with support from the President are two very different things in practice, and would be disingenuous to say that's not the case.

> The US legislative process lives and dies on building alliances and horse-trading. It used to, back in the day. That hasn't been the case for a while in today's extremely partisan environment where compromise is now a dirty word and presidential support for something makes it less likely to pass given the hostile congress that will remain even after Clinton wins.

> today's extremely partisan environment

That's all a big show on wedge issues. On topics that matter to people with money (bankruptcy laws, banking laws etc), it's just business as usual. The DMCA was passed in a similarly "partisan" environment. Don't believe the hype.

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