Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court • Hacker News Board

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#81

Post by salawat » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #56

compsciphd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anyone who believes that GPLd dynamically linked libraries impact code written to use them effectively believes that APIs can be copyrighted. (ex: the FSF believes this).

You may be right, but can you supply a citation for this? I believe many open-core software vendors work around this idea by doing exactly what you suggest: creating an API barrier where the proprietary software lives on one side and the GPL'd software on the other. It requires some care so you don't cross GPL'd software into the proprietary side, but it's fairly common. I think the Linux Nvidia GPU driver works this…

It's called a GPL condom, and that's a bit different in the end in that the GPL mandates GPL'ing code that links against GPL symbols. It's more of a contract than copyright. If you want to use these in your code, you must GPL, or reimplement at your leisure!

That's less Copyright in the sense that it's mandating the relinquishing of monopolistic control of the work product in question to the public. Oracle wants the opposite. They want Java used everywhere, and the right to sue anyone who does anything too similar to it too.

This is absolutely an act of monopolistic market shaping. No smaller firm would ever have utilized this nuclear option of a lawsuit given the widespread damage this could potentially cause to the entire software ecosystem.

This would honestly be enough to get me moving completely out of Software if the Court screws the pooch on this badly enough.

I'm not spending the rest of my life debugging code that as a matter of fact must be run through obfuscate steps to avoid copyright liability.

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#82

Post by zingermc » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

sushshshsh wrote: post #43

coldpie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand what this case is about. This is about copyrighting API descriptions. Not copying code, but reimplementing an API that someone else created. Think about how many people created each part of the various web APIs. Is XmlHTTPRequest now owned by Microsoft? Who invented the Blink tag? Who owns which parts of the SQL language? The entire software industry is built on the idea that APIs are not copyrig…

hehe this is the correct answer. basically if i make my own FileWriter class and choose to name one of the methods in that class "write()", then I'm infringing on Oracle XD Wonder what happens if I call it "_write()"

void DocumentScribbler.scribble(String s)

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#83

Post by tomcat27 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #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 all…

seriously! strike for a week.

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#84

Post by byte1918 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

I was making an analogy in my mind between API function names and song titles. IANAL but I thought at first that it doesn't make sense to copyright song titles, they are generic and uninteresting most of the time but after giving it further consideration I realized that some can be quite meaningful, for instance everyone recognizes 'Stairway to heaven' and 'Bohemian rhapsody' therefore, even though it seems a bit silly I wouldn't be surprised if those song titles are in fact copyrighted which could mean copyrighting function names is not that different. I then decided to actually google this and found out that:

>Generally, copyright law protection does not extend to song titles because they usually are short and lack sufficient originality. Therefore, you can (and often do) have multiple songs with the same name, and the first to name their song, for example "Crazy," does not have the right to stop other people from releasing their own songs named "Crazy." An exception to this is that some long titles may be found to have sufficient originality to be afforded copyright protection. I suspect that my friend's song entitled "The Concept of the Quantum-Mechanical Bodymind Has Sparked a Great Idea" is one of them. [1]

The whole article from [1] is worth reading. I wouldn't be surprised if the final verdict will be similar to song title laws from the music industry.

[1]: http://www.askamusiclawyer.com/archive/is-my-song-title-prot...

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#85

Post by teddyh » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #37

tonetheman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone who has had dealings with Oracle licensing knows how bad this is going to get.

“Do not anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.”

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=38m34s

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#86

Post by mantap » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #49

>This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product? To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle's claims... Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this. Instead, Google copied the API of function name spellings and also…

> If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.

This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything.

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#87

Post by gpm » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #50

diffeomorphism wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms: 0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. The only thi…

No, the GPL depends on copyright to function. Otherwise it degenerates into a BSD-family license (actually not even that, as you wouldn't have to give credit to the original author). GPL requires you to provide the source of binary software you ship to your users by revoking your copyright grant if you do not do that. If you remove the threat of copyright enforcement, then I can ship your GPL library without shipping…

A bsd family licence allows the next programmer to add on new legal restrictions (e.g. no modifying the binary, no distributing the modified binary, no reverse engineering the binary, ...).

In a world with no copyright the source code requirement dies, but all the remaining freedoms stay intact. Reverse engineering and decompilers become much more important.

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#88

Post by threatofrain » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #49

>This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product? To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle's claims... Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this. Instead, Google copied the API of function name spellings and also…

There will likely be no such thing as "drop-in" replacement anymore either.

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#89

Post by gpm » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #76

tiffanyh wrote: post #70

Question: so if Oracle wins, does that mean no one can create compatible APIs in general? I know a lot of folks have created compatible APIs for Amazon S3, including Oracle themselves. Does this become against the law if Oracle wins? https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...

Sort of. Copyright is a civil matter, not criminal, so it requires two to tango. What I mean is, you can copy the API, but then the creator can choose to sue you. Or not. It turns our mostly-open computing landscape into a stand-off, exactly like the current software patent situation. The big guys have all the guns to hold each other off, but they can all take out the small guys who threaten them.

Copyright is both civil and in the case of wilful infringement criminal...

Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

#90

Post by coldpie » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

compsciphd wrote: post #78

coldpie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right, but can you supply a citation for this? I believe many open-core software vendors work around this idea by doing exactly what you suggest: creating an API barrier where the proprietary software lives on one side and the GPL'd software on the other. It requires some care so you don't cross GPL'd software into the proprietary side, but it's fairly common. I think the Linux Nvidia GPU driver works this…

citation that the FSF believes that GPLd libraries when dynamically linked require the all the code to be GPLd? https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c... or something else? I agree that many create that API barrier (ex: ZFS on Linux). Those that argue that ZFS on Linux is legally problematic agree with the FSF's definition (which I would argue leads to the belief that APIs are copyrightable). Th…

Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the read, it was very interesting. I thought this was a settled matter, but it looks like I was wrong.