Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
1–10 of 433 posts
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#2Waiting for Oracle to patent social networks and sue Facebook...
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#3Waiting for Oracle to patent social networks and sue Facebook...
I am always downvoted when I comment on Oracle stories but if Tiktok has any IP around social or uploading videos... you that is exactly their intention.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#4> Those in Oracle's camp say if its copyright is not protected, that will discourage innovation.
Look at the way YouTube Content ID encourages innovation and then imagine GitHub Content ID.
“Your repository contains 3 copyrighted method calls. You’ve been issued a copyright strike.”
I’d love to see every open source repo on the internet go private for 1 day as a demonstration of what could be lost if copyright is allowed to weasel its way into APIs.
GitHub and NPM should give users the option to block their repos for a day. A bazillion failing builds would open some eyes IMO.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#5> Google argues that no one should be allowed to claim ownership of this kind of code.
Imagine if we took Google's argument seriously and extended it. What if code were inherently less copyrightable when it is more structural and boilerplate-filled? That could be a great thing, but Google themselves might be surprised at how little of their proprietary code qualifies for copyright under this standard.
For example, would Google's protobuf schemata still be copyrightable? They're needed for interoperability, after all. Would Google's client-side code for Youtube and Google Docs still be copyrightable? It's delivered in textual form to the end-user. Would Android's interface code be copyrightable? Probably not, by exactly the same argument that Google has been making before the courts!
If Google wins, then not only does Oracle lose, but the institution of copyright might also lose, which is an exciting proposition.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#6> Google argues that no one should be allowed to claim ownership of this kind of code. Imagine if we took Google's argument seriously and extended it. What if code were inherently less copyrightable when it is more structural and boilerplate-filled? That could be a great thing, but Google themselves might be surprised at how little of their proprietary code qualifies for copyright under this standard. For example, wo…
Id rather have nothing copyrighted than everything copyrighted. I also don’t have a huge problem with interfaces = no copyright and implementations = copyright.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#7Scotus Blog did a great job describing the case for those who need to know a case preview before it goes up to the Supreme Court:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/10/case-preview-justices-to-...
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#8> Those in Oracle's camp say if its copyright is not protected, that will discourage innovation. Look at the way YouTube Content ID encourages innovation and then imagine GitHub Content ID. “Your repository contains 3 copyrighted method calls. You’ve been issued a copyright strike.” I’d love to see every open source repo on the internet go private for 1 day as a demonstration of what could be lost if copyright is all…
In this timeline, the Wine repo mirror will be instantaneously banned on GitHub.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#9> Google argues that no one should be allowed to claim ownership of this kind of code. Imagine if we took Google's argument seriously and extended it. What if code were inherently less copyrightable when it is more structural and boilerplate-filled? That could be a great thing, but Google themselves might be surprised at how little of their proprietary code qualifies for copyright under this standard. For example, wo…
Getting rid of copyright restrictions for everything software-related (as a first step at least) would be a win-win for everybody involved.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#10I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.
This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.