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Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

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Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#251

Post by pjmlp »

monocasa wrote: post #222
lmm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google believed they could implement their own VM and get something cheaper (and/or better) than they would get by licensing one from Sun. That seems like a perfectly legitimate business decision for them to make. A clean-room reimplementation of an existing API had long been thought to be legally clear, going all the way back to Compaq reimplementing the IBM BIOS and starting the "IBM-compatible" competitive ecosyst…

> better That's it. The VMs on the market at the time we're absolutely terrible for phones. John Carmack was commenting on how JavaME gave you worse performance than an original IBM PC, and HotSpot's strategies absolutely destroy battery life.

Except that wasn't the only approach available.

There are OEMs selling commercial JDKs for embedded use, with their own VM, JIT and AOT compiler variations, and library extensions.

Contrary to Google, they always played by the rules.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#252

Post by AaronFriel »

Can IBM enforce API copyright against BIOS vendors under this doctrine?

Does this revive the SCO linux case? Who owns the copyright for POSIX/UNIX system APIs?

What about cloud provider compatibility shims, e.g.: S3 reimplementations or Localstack?

I am left with nothing but more questions about the broadness of this decision.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#253

Post by hcknwscommenter »

Tloewald wrote: post #193
kemitche wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's more like copyrighting the standard height of a door.

It's more analogous to -- very analogous to -- the "clean room" BIOS clones that enabled the PC Clone industry to take off (and made IBM-compatible PCs actually affordable; before the clones took off, IBM's prices made Apple seem like a bargain).

Except Google did not do a clean room clone. They simply copied, thus violating the whole point of copyright. If they had developed their own API that simply used different names but was functionally identical, they would not have violated copyright. Copyright protects against copying. They didn't do that because they wanted to take advantage of the huge existing JAVA developer base who would easily be able to use the copied APIs to develop for Android. I.e., Google chose to copy and thus are liable for that choice.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#254

Post by monocasa »

ninkendo wrote: post #247
monocasa wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The court has made the point now that literally just the class and method names are subject to copyright.

Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be. I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from…

Triviality isn't the determining factor of what's copyrightable.

Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines.

Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for software interoperability purposes.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#255

Post by treis »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #218
treis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fundamental difference between: Blackbox testing -> API Specification -> Implementation and Copy API Specification -> Implementaton In the first case, you will come up with something similar but ultimately original. In the second case you are blatantly copying someone else's work.

...I don't really see what the difference is. In both cases Google would end up with exactly the same API specification. There's no room for them to come up with an "original" API, because if the API they end up with is not an _exact copy_ of Oracle's, then software written for Oracle's Java implementation would not be compatible with Google's Java implementation (and vice-versa).

It is effectively impossible to take something as complex as the Java API, do black box testing, and come up with an exact copy. Google's API being slightly different is ultimately the point. The process yields a new original work even if it ends up being 99% the same as Oracle's API.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#256

Post by CobrastanJorji »

suyash wrote: post #232
manigandham wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually use the Oracle Cloud? From my attempts, it's only full of misery and broken tech.

It's growing rapidly in Enterprise IT on all all three fronts IAAS, PAAS, SAAS.

Do you know something nobody else does? Because the news seems to indicate that its growth has been slowing for a year now, which is not good news in a rapidly growing market. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-apos-cloud-growth-disa...

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#257

Post by monocasa »

pjmlp wrote: post #251
monocasa wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better That's it. The VMs on the market at the time we're absolutely terrible for phones. John Carmack was commenting on how JavaME gave you worse performance than an original IBM PC, and HotSpot's strategies absolutely destroy battery life.

Except that wasn't the only approach available. There are OEMs selling commercial JDKs for embedded use, with their own VM, JIT and AOT compiler variations, and library extensions. Contrary to Google, they always played by the rules.

In 2008, none were as good as Dalvik for the use case.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#258

Post by guelo »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #153
sqdbps wrote: post #43

This is ridiculous. Google won two jury trials and the CAFC has no business deciding copyright cases.

>> Google won two jury trials and the CAFC has no business deciding copyright cases. I think that's their only business, by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...

It's a patent court, not copyrights.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#259

Post by belltaco »

wolfgke wrote: post #148
BoorishBears wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

Just to give examples that look plausible to me: Because of the legal burden Google decided to implement their own version of the Java standard library based on Apache Harmony. With every new version of Java coming there might be new legal pitfalls to consider and surely almost always the sword of Damocles that Oracle might consider the fact that Google implemented new Java features as a reason to extort more money f…

Legal burden or trying to save money? Didn't they get a license offer for $100M? Maybe they could've negotiated it down.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#260

Post by dragonwriter »

merb wrote: post #203
guelo wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

B. Java is not licensed under the GPL. C. Not going to happen.

B. Java is not licensed under the GPL. OpenJDK is.

OpenJDK didn't exist when Google developed Android, so it would have been very hard for them to use it.
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