Earlier quoted context omitted.
V8 is ten years old?! How time flies...
I have the opposite response: only a decade old? Same with YouTube actually, I can't really remember what the Web was like without video streaming
[deleted]
Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
411–420 of 643 posts
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the ruling: > The Java API is a collection of “pre-written Java source code programs for common and more advanced computer functions.” I'm not too familiar with Java, but I believe they are mistaking APIs for libraries there. Did Google infringe on the libraries or the actual API? Like did Google actually infringe on what Oracle calls the "Java API" (but is actually a library), and are we all talking past each o…
> if Oracle hadn't also accused Oracle initially of patent infringement. Was this a mistake or did Oracle actually accuse themselves of infringing their own patents?
That sounds like something Oracle might actually do.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#413I’m not sure if I have the timeline correct but I thought Java was owned by Sun Microsystems at the time when they made these decisions. I’m sure they rightly assumed Sun Microsystems would never do this. It is sad to see what Oracle is doing with Sun Microsystem’s creation.
> they rightly assumed Sun Microsystems would never do this Interestingly, the article includes a quote from a Sun Microsystems co-founder who agrees with Oracle's stance on this: > Among Oracle’s supporters in the case is Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, who said Java was created to be a platform-neutral system where programmers could “write once, run anywhere.” > Java “is the foundation upon which our digital world is…
> Java “is the foundation upon which our digital world is built”
I think McNealy is taking rather too much credit for Java here. Yes, it's widely used. The foundation? The foundation? Hardly.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
SUN wasn't very happy about Google using Java without paying anything. IIRC SUN wanted Google to use J2ME and get some modest fees; instead Google decided to reimplement API, pissing off all top guys at SUN who publicly were OK with it (hoping they could negotiate some payment), but internally were boiling.
I don't think J2ME was suitable for googles usage regardless of price. Unsuitable tech is unsuitable if someone pays YOU 100M
Sure, I also found it funny back then, but that was what SUN management was thinking...
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you are not getting the point of the whole "copyright the API" thing this discussion is talking about. If I can copyright the API then it doesn't matter if you clean room or not since the API is copyright and I can sue the heck out of you no matter how you did your work. That is my point that you are missing. IBM didn't believe they could copyright the API so they took some additional measures. If they thought th…
Actually, you're not getting it. Copyright means I can't copy your work. If I arrive independently at the same thing, then I didn't copy your work and therefore didn't violate your copyright. If I take your picture of a building and copy that's a copyright violation. If I take a picture of a building from the exact same angle you did, that's not a copyright violation.
That's true, but if you type and distribute a book that happens to match the latest Harry Potter, nobody - including the courts - will believe you independently came up with that exact sequence of words.
Similarly, if you copy the definitions of all functions/methods/classes/etc from one API, nobody will believe you independently came up with it.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, you're not getting it. Copyright means I can't copy your work. If I arrive independently at the same thing, then I didn't copy your work and therefore didn't violate your copyright. If I take your picture of a building and copy that's a copyright violation. If I take a picture of a building from the exact same angle you did, that's not a copyright violation.
> If I arrive independently at the same thing, then I didn't copy your work and therefore didn't violate your copyright. That's not how it works for copyright. Beyond that, how do you independently arrive at an API that you are trying to have an exact copy of? Photography is not programming. I cannot run a bunch of words through a program until it prints out some book I want and then say I arrived at it independently…
I suppose you could argue that black box reproduction is simply an elaborate form of copying. That's not relevant to this case because Google did simply just copy it.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#417It's a shame that there was no one like judge Alsup in the appeals court. Now it's about legal phrases and licensing terms instead of common sense all over again.
Unpopular opinion: I feel Google should be punished for what they did to Java. Maybe the mechanism being used is wrong, but Android bastardized Java and as an Android developer I feel real damage has been done to the health of the Java ecosystem by having billions of devices run fragmented Java-but-not-Java. Google has started to make it right with the switch to openJDK and Desugar, but in a lot of ways it’s too litt…
Its not the courts purpose to ensure the health of the java ecosystem its purpose to decide what the law is now and going forward.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> reverse engineering That is certainly an issue if you reverse engineer anything. Google went out of their way to NOT reverse engineer it. The issue is can a public API be copyrighted. That is the scary issue.
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.
How is an API different than any other product specification? Why can't e.g. Panasonic sue other manufacturers for making an 18650 form factor battery cell? Why can't Ford license the form factor that every car uses for a gas nozzle? There's fundamentally not a way to create your own compatible implementation without using the same API.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi ABCLAW, I read page 17 and it is clearly written by someone that doesn't understand software. My non-lawyer reading of the justification implies that polymorphism violates copyright law - which is an even deeper issue. This would destroy all modern software development. Yikes! I am now even more confused. Even Oracle would disagree with this point of view. In your text, you are now making the argument that Google…
1) Judges aren't computer scientists, and LOTS of IP cases read very poorly as a result. This is a structural issue with how judges are educated within court rooms regarding the facts surrounding the disputes in question - but let's just accept it as an unfortunate cost to adjudicating the way we do. Regarding your polymorphism point, you've got the cause and effect swapped. The LACK of polymorphism was the basis for…
I have just read from page 17 to 33. I expected a load of bullcrap, but ended up with only one nugget, page 31:
> We further find that the district court erred in focusing its merger analysis on the options available to Google at the time of copying. It is well-established that copyrightability and the scope of protectable activity are to be evaluated at the time of creation, not at the time of infringement.
The error is subtle, but crucial: when Sun/Oracle released their API, they gave rise to a new functionality: interoperability with whatever they just created. If someone wants to write a drop-in replacement, they have to read the declarations, copy them all, then write a conforming implementation.
Changing the order of those declarations would still be possible, but one would still have to start from the original files anyway. Assuming those were readable to begin with, any transformation would be a purely legal trick, so they can say "I didn't really copied it".
As far as I can tell the court either ignored or dismissed this interoperability issue. Agreeing with Oracle that Google could have renamed its function names, even though those names are part of the API they were conforming to (the `max` function is obviously part of the standard library), is ignorant at best, dishonest at worst.
Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
You actually do a clean room implementation rather than copying chunks of your competitor's work and then pretending it's allowed under fair use? Seems pretty straightforward.
Google did clean room implementation of almost all functions. They copied 9 lines of implementation code verbatim - out of thousands of lines. It does raise a question in my mind as to how that one function got copies, but it's also possible that it was re-implemented and happened to be done exactly the same without looking at the original - I honestly don't know but Google conceded it was a duplicate either way. 9 L…
>It does raise a question in my mind as to how that one function got copies, but it's also possible that it was re-implemented and happened to be done exactly the same without looking at the original
They literally admit to having copied it.
All the hypotheticals trying to find the end of cleanroom dev in this case keep missing the point: They didn't do cleanroom dev. They admit to not having done it. Their defenses aren't organized around them doing it. So what's the furor about?