351–360 of 643 posts
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Me too, alumni from that little company located in Espoo.
I hope that little company does not come under pressure to make Android phones.
So one either swims or joins the graveyard of companies that tried to fight it.
It may be helpful for readers to look at the actual meat and potatoes of the decision itself. I recommend jumping in at Page 27 of the decision so that they can see how the fair use factors were evaluated in this case: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-or... Fair use has four factors, lets see how it shook out: 1) Purpose and Character: Google tried to argue that because android is free that i…
If API are copyrightable how do clean room implementations work? It seems IBM could sue the clone makers for the BIOS API if that's the case.
Or IBM could realize if they start doing that, it might show the insanity of the current law, and result in the law changing back to what it was and should be, API's not copyrightable.
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How many ways are there to define max? Surely AT&T should turn around and sue Oracle for lifting max(a, b) from stdlib. Or maybe SCO will rise from the grave and try it again.
An infinite number of ways. Call it max(b,a) [i.e., reverse the order of b and a inputs]. But Google didn't do any of that. They copied.
People shouldn't have to write shit code cause judges are tech illiterate.
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If API are copyrightable how do clean room implementations work? It seems IBM could sue the clone makers for the BIOS API if that's the case.
Does that mean all the cloud providers who are copying S3's API for object storage are violating some copyright?
There is a reason for this: if it were the rule that an appellate court could easily step in and second-guess how a jury weighs evidence, there would be little room for finality with jury verdicts because lawyers are very skilled (and become very tiresome) endlessly arguing why this or that fact is better than another and why a court should weigh things differently than the way a jury did.
In this case, the Federal Circuit Court did what amounted a wholesale second-guessing of what the jury concluded about the facts here.
I am not saying the issues were not complex and that it had absolutely no basis for coming to different conclusions.
But the zeal with which this particular court upholds IP absolutism is truly a marvel.
This is the court that gave us the frivolous patent bonanza dating back to 1990s by which "everything under the sun" became patentable and many suffered for years from the consequent harm.
So too with the way it is handling copyright law in this Oracle/Google dispute. Yes, by all means, let us protect the hell out of APIs and invite endless future litigation that ensures that easy connectivity in the computer world will no longer depend on engineers but on lawyers. And let us say that "no reasonable jury" could possibly conclude that copying even a tiny amount of code could possibly be "quantitatively insignificant" so as to shield the one doing the copying from claims of copyright infringement, all the better to ensure that future lawyers can conjure up infringement claims from all sorts of seemingly quantitatively trivial copying.
I deliberately exaggerate in how I characterize this decision knowing that it glosses over all sorts of fine points that are the subject of profound argument among lawyers. But I do so to capture the spirit of this decision and what decisions like this mean for computing generally.
Yes, a very broad theory of what is patentable can readily be defended in the name of protecting IP rights and lawyers can come up with endless arguments for why this should be so. So too can lawyers make convincing arguments for very broad theories of copyrightability and very narrow readings of fair use. In both cases, the law protecting IP gets an expansive reading.
Well, speaking as one who has tilled this soil for a long time and who very much supports and sees the need for strong support of IP rights, I can only say that the Federal Circuit Court has proven to be a largely counter-productive force in serving as a specialized court dealing with IP among federal courts. This ruling will do what its prior expansive reading of patent law did: it will set up a legal standard that invites lawyers and litigants to engage in endless second-guessing over copyright and fair use in areas of connectivity and inter-operability in the computing world and this in turn, as a standing invitation to litigate, cannot be good for future development.
It may be helpful for readers to look at the actual meat and potatoes of the decision itself. I recommend jumping in at Page 27 of the decision so that they can see how the fair use factors were evaluated in this case: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-or... Fair use has four factors, lets see how it shook out: 1) Purpose and Character: Google tried to argue that because android is free that i…
1) AMD chips aren't free and the usage is totally for a commercial purpose.
2) ISAs are an API.
3) While the implementation is probably clean-room, it's still a total copy of the ISA structure and function call/return value.
4) Intel has been directly harmed by AMD competition, which results in them needing to be price competitive in certain markets.
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I don't get why it's a scary issue or even controversial why an API would be subject copyright. An API, in my mind, is similar to design drawings or blueprints. Independently figuring out how to implement those drawings doesn't change the fact that you copied the design.
Can you copyright the architecture of a building? Like can you copyright the opera house so that no one else can build something similar or a copy?
Using this as an analogy for the API would mean anything that was part of the technical implementation could be copied but inconsequential or artistic parts couldn't. This has been interpreted to mean that the actual code is "creative", so you'd have the framework of the code but not the non-essential parts that could be different and still allow the API to work.
It may be helpful for readers to look at the actual meat and potatoes of the decision itself. I recommend jumping in at Page 27 of the decision so that they can see how the fair use factors were evaluated in this case: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-or... Fair use has four factors, lets see how it shook out: 1) Purpose and Character: Google tried to argue that because android is free that i…
So then theoretically, Intel could sue AMD for supporting their x86 ISA? 1) AMD chips aren't free and the usage is totally for a commercial purpose. 2) ISAs are an API. 3) While the implementation is probably clean-room, it's still a total copy of the ISA structure and function call/return value. 4) Intel has been directly harmed by AMD competition, which results in them needing to be price competitive in certain mar…
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The 1% that's different being... what? Bugs? Like I said, any differences in Google's version of the API would, by definition, be interoperability problems that need to be corrected. To make that more concrete: if Oracle's string concatenation function is called `String.concat` and Google's is called `String.append`, then code which calls `String.concat` isn't going to work with Google's implementation, and code whic…
The 1% will be things like String.methodNoOneUses or ObscureClass. Even if they aren't identical they will be close enough for 99.999% of the programs people write.