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

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

#141

Post by dagw »

Spivak wrote: post #112
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…

> We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement. You do realize that if literally all you do is change the names and spellings then you'll still be in violation of copyright, right? Translating a book into another language (where the names and spellings of every word are different) is still copyright infringement. The fact that the names and s…

You do realize that if literally all you do is change the names and spellings then you'll still be in violation of copyright, right?

In general that is largely true. In the particular type of copyright being argued in this particular case Oracle has stated that changing the name or spelling of the methods would have been enough to avoid being in violation:

Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked."

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

#142

Post by gpm »

frant-hartm wrote: post #129
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...

AWS SDK is under Apache 2 license, so anyone is able to use it (suppose you comply with the license - attribution etc..). Google did a similar thing with OpenJDK (which is GPL) starting with Android N, why they didn't do it in the first place I don't know, Sun published OpenJDK under GPL in 2007, first 1.0 Android release was in 2008.

Though for the purposes of this case it is interesting to note that oracle did copy the aww api and did not comply with the apache 2 license (nothing, including distributed derivative works like their api documents, contains attribution).

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

#143

Post by gjsman-1000 »

What may throw Oracle for a loop is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was considered in legal circles to have a strong view of property rights and many people I've read online considered her to be a near-certain vote for Oracle. Her death makes this a much less certain Oracle victory.

To quote The Verge:

"The absolute least important part of Ginsburg’s legacy is that she was the most reliable vote in copyright law cases, tending to vote in favor of rights-holders. Her loss also means that Google v. Oracle is being heard by eight justices and is therefore prone to a split court. (In the 1996 software copyright case Lotus v. Borland, an eight-justice court split evenly and was unable to set national precedent)."

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

#144

Post by gpm »

dlandis wrote: post #98

I wouldn't be surprised if the decision is very narrow in this case or if it is even postponed again until there is a ninth justice. But I have a bad feeling it will be decided in favor of Oracle, since considering specific APIs part of the "idea" rather than the expression seems to be more of a convention among software engineers rather than actually part of the law. APIs can be "expressions", after all, it just dep…

If they decide it narrowly I bet they overturn the federal circuits decision to override the jury (constitutional right to a jury trial, oracle waived the argument about a court ruling on legal aspects of free use when they agreed to the jury instructions) and leave all the interesting legal questions open.

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

#146

Post by dragonwriter »

Spivak wrote: post #122
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the compatibility layer be infringing copyright?

This is where I think a lot of people are talking past this case. If you use the API surface area for the purposes of interoperability with existing software then you're covered and it's not infringement. If you use the API surface area for your own software because you like the design, copying it is easier than coming up with something new, or you want to provide a familiar programming environment to developers then…

> If you use the API surface area for the purposes of interoperability with existing software then you're covered and it's not infringement.

Google did that: for compatibility with existing Java tooling, which is software.

Sure, Java apps aren't, unmodified, compatible with Android, but the compatibility makes tooling and intermediate libraries compatible, which is a functional, interoperability concern.

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

#147

Post by d3ntb3ev1l »

dragonwriter wrote: post #131
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…

> Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this. That's not true, there were nine lines of source code (range check) copied verbatim, not counting the 11,500 lines of API declarations. But the API declarations are source code, too. > If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to…

Folks realize some of the people at Google were actually previously on the Java team.

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

#148

Post by marcosdumay »

compsciphd wrote: post #75
marcosdumay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is different. In the GPL case, you are distributing the software, not just using the API. I don't know if it's different enough, but it's not the exact same issue.

if I distribute the GPL library (say libreadline) with my app, I'd probably agree with you. If I expect the end user to have libreadline installed on their machine (from debian / redhat repos, and for argument sake Debian/Red Hat/et al aren't distributing my app), I think I'd disagree. I'm not distributing any GPLd code. I think its a bit more complicated if Debian/Red Hat are distributing my non GPLd app that links…

> If I expect the end user to have libreadline installed on their machine (from debian / redhat repos, and for argument sake Debian/Red Hat/et al aren't distributing my app), I think I'd disagree. I'm not distributing any GPLd code.

Well, IANAL, but I fail to see how you are bound by the GPL in any way on that situation.

There used to be a market of proprietary software patches, that fixed stuff the software creator didn't bother changing. AFAIK, nobody ever contested its legality until EULA came and made it illegal to the end-user (instead of the distributor). There is a famous guy who sells proprietary security patches for Linux, isn't there? Your example is much clearer than patches.

The situation of RedHat distributing both isn't as clear.

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

#149

Post by asah »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #134
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's worse than that isn't it? Naming is how you link things. What happens to WINE if it is illegal to use the same names Kernel32 does?

It's bad for programmers everywhere. If Oracle wins, you couldn't reimplement a compatible version of anything that's not open source. You couldn't make a third-party implementation of a corporate-owned programming language without putting yourself at risk. Imagine you're a company using some Oracle database, and you want to reimplement some component of that system in order to migrate and escape their vendor lock-in…

by the by... wasn't Oracle's original product a relational database management system (RDBMS) that offered a SQL API... which was invented/copyrighted by IBM ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

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

#150

Post by marcosdumay »

compsciphd wrote: post #119
belorn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you explain to a judge the difference between distributing a library and app code to the user, and expecting the user to download the library themselves and then you combine the app-code and the library afterward, will they care or will they see the two methods as being practically identical in terms of forming a single derivative program out of the library and app-code. In the past people argued that streaming co…

except in the case of libreadline, its highly likely that any Linux user (i.e. bash depends on it) already has the library on the system. I'm not distributing it. But lets get into the weeds a little. Lets say I am distributing it according to all definitions. I'm allowed to distribute GPLd material. I'm allowed to distribute non GPLd material. I'm allowed to distribute them together even (say a linux CD without the…

I think there were some legal fighting over PHP and the Mysql client over that exact issue. PHP generalized their interface and was deemed not derivative, but I don't know what kind of judgment it got.
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