Google files opening Supreme Court brief in Oracle v. Google copyright lawsuit

Google's arguments were already refuted in the earliest hearings. There's a reason this is going to the supreme court, the rulings didn't really match up with accepted evidence and testimony of experts in the court.

Google will lose this. You don't explicitly copy code, take other people's engineers after exiting licensing talks with the company you took from, and have it not be about stealing someone else's intellectual efforts.

The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability. The grey area is how much damage Google has done to Oracle, and it's hard to put an explicit price on that. But given the popularity of Android and how Google's has massively benefited from the platform, in no small thanks to the development community around it, and given the absolutely morbid failure of its other community dev efforts it's not really hard to see that Android wouldn't be what it is today without Java; having a familiar platform for developers to code against is priceless (but not legally).

Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it.

Sun put a lot, and I mean a lot of money into Java. Java had well defined licensing terms for how to use their code. Oracle bought Java. Oracle has the rights to license and price their code however they want. Google does not. Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it. Instead Google took engineers from the company they copied code from, and re-licensed said code.

It's black and white but people's blind hate for Oracle leads them down an argument or view point the courts have already denied and are now ignoring.

Don't sacrifice your principles for some cheap hit against Oracle. If Google can just throw their man power around to ignore your license, your open source license will not matter. You will not get credit for the work you do. Google and others can just feel like they don't want to abide by your license, take your code, and re-license it however they want. It's already hard to enforce any type of open source licence but if Google comes out on top it really won't matter moving forward. That is what is at stake here.

"What we’ve actually been asked to do (by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome. We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need." - Email from Tim Lindholm, a Google Engineer

From the most recent hearing:

"Ultimately, we find that, even assuming the jury was unpersuaded that Google acted in bad faith, the highly commercial and non-transformative nature of the use strongly support the conclusion that the first factor weighs against a finding of fair use." - https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20180327178

The argument that Google deserves punishment because they didn't buy another company is not one I'm even remotely sympathetic to.

The entire industry would be worse off today if our legal policy on APIs was, "they're copyrighted, but don't worry, you can just buy out companies you want to interop with." Imagine how much smaller and how much more uninteresting the tech world would be.

Any company that wasn't the size of Google couldn't have bought Sun, and any company, even companies smaller than Google, should be free to interop with the Java APIs the same way that Google did. Discussions about whether or not Google could have bought Sun are meaningless to me, I don't think they have anything of value to add to the current case, and I don't think they have anything to do with Oracle buying Sun with the sole intention of suing someone else.

You're replying to a thread where someone complains about Google excessively filing patents as a defensive/offensive measure, and your argument is that Google should also be excessively buying companies as a defensive measure against lawsuits?

There's a bit of "get you coming and going" here.

If the NSA -- and other state / state-like actors -- are omnipotent, and can always find you through your email, etc, you either have to stop what you're doing or be willing to deal with being caught or exposed.

If they aren't all-powerful, but people stop using email to communicate and stop carrying out their business because of the belief they are, that also serves the same purpose as catching or exposing the people in question -- it stops their activities.

This reminds me of the idea behind WikiLeaks -- not just to expose the leaked documents, but to make it so costly to carry on secret communications and operations that people stop trying.

Even Gosling isn't advocating that the APIs were copyrighted. What he advocates is that he doesn't think it was actually a clean-room implementation, and that Google should have been 'nicer' about the whole process in general -- that regardless of the legal points, Google was kind of a jerk.

When it gets to the subject of APIs, Gosling is suddenly a lot less accusatory. Here's the actual conversation:

> Host: "I would hate to see a law or ruling that APIs are copyrightable, because that would have a chilling effect across the whole --"

> Gosling: "Yeah, that would be bad. But it kind of feels like the lawyers and laws and legal teams -- they do what they can."

But our laws don't punish companies for being mean, and issues around Google's actual clean-room implementation are largely irrelevant at this point in the lawsuit. It's pretty clear that Oracle bought Sun with the intention of going after Google far more aggressively and on far more legally tenuous grounds than Sun was ever interested in doing.

Last year I went to refresh my memory on the status of the case and all pop press referred to “11,500 lines of code” copier. I couldn’t find any clarification of those are all API calls. Anyone know or better yet have a reference with analysis?