Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 433 posts

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

#171

Post by pjmlp »

bitL wrote: post #163
Zigurd wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been across the table from Sun licensing people when using an open source Java in a project, "some reasonable sum" is optimistic. In fact any transparency about what sum they might demand is optimistic.

AFAIK they were pretty open to some reasonable sum as they were internally fans of Google, but due to Google's arrogance the upper management relationship with them soured, then opportunistic Oracle bought them and here we are.

You mean the only company that actually made an offer to buy Sun and kept it?

Google could have own Java, avoid the lawsuit and keep it Go style frozen at Java 6 instead.

And given Google's history they would have killed the other products even sooner than Oracle did.

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

#172

Post by dragonwriter »

dagw wrote: post #141
Spivak wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Orac…

> Oracle has stated that changing the name or spelling of the methods would have been enough to avoid being in violation:

“Oracle has stated” doesn't make it consistent with the law. Sure, the Supreme Court could create a new rule in this case which would make it true, but there is no existing legal rule I can ser that would make thesaurus substitution not infringement of something that was otherwise infringement.

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

#173

Post by ford_o »

bosswipe wrote: post #57

It's shocking to me that two jury trials spent months considering arguments from lawyers and experts from all sides and carefully came to a decision only to have the appeals court throw that all away and impose the opposite ruling, twice. What was the point of the trials? I don't know why the Federal Circuit court is so biased towards maximalist interpretations of IP law but I really hope the Supreme Court slaps it d…

What happens if I expose a Java FFI ( i.e. thin wrapper around Java stdlib) in my toy language. Do I break their license?

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

#174

Post by simiones »

dagw wrote: post #141
Spivak wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Orac…

You are misinterpreting that argument. To prove copyrightability, Oracle had to show that designing an API is a creative act and not a purely mechanical/functional one. That is the purpose of this argument: if the function would only work if named java.lang.Math.max and not work if named Math.maximum, then anyone describing the same concept would be forced to use the same name, so the name wouldn't be copyrightable. They are not stating that Google would have been in the clear if they had named it differently, they are just trying to show that Google could have named it differently without changing the meaning of the code one iota.

For example, someone writing a recipe for omelette has to say "2 eggs" simply because that's what omelette needs. You can't express it any other way, so it's not a creative act, so it can't be protected by copyright.

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

#175

Post by raverbashing »

asah wrote: post #149
tachyonbeam wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course.

But Oracle doesn't care one bit about anything else that's not Oracle.

Though it is still to be known how many reimplemented APIs from others does Oracle have in their products

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

#176

Post by Kednicma »

Zigurd wrote: post #154
Kednicma wrote: post #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, wo…

That is an absurd position. APIs are facts, like sports scores, or the amounts and ingredients in a recipe. Those are not protectable, and making them protectable is plainly ridiculous.

Careful there. Source code to a program is also a fact; it's merely the proof of some statement in some theory. This is one way to view the Curry-Howard-Lambek isomorphism. So, then, what is it about source code which would make it copyrightable again? Are systems like Metamath and Opentheory eligible for copyright or not?

To me, the current copyright regime is what's "absurd" and "plainly ridiculous"; I am merely drawing conclusions based on what exists.

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

#177

Post by ford_o »

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...

And what about FFI?

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

#178

Post by bitwize »

asah wrote: post #149
tachyonbeam wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's the whole "Disney wants the copyright laws to prevent anyone from doing to Disney what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm" thing.

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

#180

Post by Doddler »

mantap wrote: post #130
jasode wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming : [...] 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…

If I take a book, say Harry Potter, and use a thesaurus to change words to their synonyms in the hopes of avoiding copyright, no court is going to agree that I can now publish Barry Otter and the Association of the Eagle as my own creation.

I don't know if that's true. At least it you wrote a story which is almost exactly like Harry Potter from scratch, without referencing the original and with none of the original characters, I don't believe this would be an issue under current copyright rules.
Post reply on HN