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

#191

Post by salawat » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #174

dagw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Java namespaces fall into the latter category, since there is an embedded graph of symbolic coordinates. The existence of Refactoring negates that it can be seen as an accidentally creative act.

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

#192

Post by GoblinSlayer » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

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…

>you want to reimplement some component of that system

That's patching and is already disallowed by licenses in USA, but allowed by law, but that law was goofed up by a court.

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

#193

Post by sgc » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

zingermc wrote: post #82

sushshshsh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Using String as a ProgType(tm)? That's a paddlin'. We use CharGroup around here, which we are willing to license for a small fee. For a limited time, get 10% off when you license three or more ProgTypes(tm)! Indemnification licensed separately. Contact our enterprise relations desk for details.

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

#194

Post by jcranmer » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

simiones wrote: post #167

dragonwriter wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Google tried to argue for fair use under the idea of interoperability, but the (few) intentional differences from Java that prevent most Java programs from running unmodified on Android pretty much bombed that case...

Note that Google won both the jury trials (first on not violating copyright, and then on the violation being fair use after the first was overturned on CAFC).

In other words, Google won on most or all of its arguments at the jury trial level, and CAFC kept overturning all of its arguments. The sentiment I'm getting from the oral arguments is that SCOTUS is leaning much more towards "CAFC is off its rocker" here.

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

#195

Post by radford-neal » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:56 PM UTC

Doddler wrote: post #180

mantap wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you won't. I don't think the law cares about hypothetical occurrences that have probability less than 10^-100000000000.

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

#196

Post by jcranmer » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

bismuthsalt wrote: post #190

simiones wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Designing an API is a creative act. An API is source code. Witness thousands of languages, all with recognizably different standard libraries, including languages like Go or Dart created by Google themselves. The problem is less with individual examples like "max" vs "maximum" or "write" vs "scribble", but more with thousands of packages, classes and methods, 99% of which have the exact names and structure as the Sun…

> The problem is less with individual examples like "max" vs "maximum" or "write" vs "scribble", but more with thousands of packages, classes and methods, 99% of which have the exact names and structure as the Sun's Java ones. That is blatant theft.

You know, it might be worth asking the engineer who wrote java.lang.Math how he came up with those names. Actually, you don't--he already answered it one of the amici briefs. The answer was that he took it from C.

In other words, taking Oracle's argument at face value means that the example API it is accusing Google of illegally copying is itself an illegal copy of the UNIX copyright, whoever actually owns that now.

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

#197

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #169

dragonwriter wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when it's Google's intention that will decide this case. Why do you presuppose to know the legal rule that the Supreme Court will articulate in its decision? I mean, you seem to presuppose that the Court will uphold the Federal Circuit on all contested questions of law and only reconsider whether the decision on the facts is reasonable, which is...mighty presumptuous. It's quite conceivable that Google could win on…

That seems to be what a lot of legal folks are speculating. That an 8-person court will find essentially technical legal reasons to overturn the appeal and essentially punt on making a major copyright ruling one way or the other.

A ruling overturning the CAFC on the basis that fair use is a fact issue for the jury not subject to de novo review on appeal would still be a major (though not transformative, since outside of the CAFC in this case that seems to be how it has historically been treated) copyright decision.

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

#198

Post by amanaplanacanal » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #133

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. Or the companies that the developers work for pay the original creator of the API, which is the solution Oracle are angling for.

If the original creator is willing to license them at all.

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

#199

Post by webmaven » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

mantap wrote: post #86

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…

> 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.

That also isn't how copyright works.

You're essentially asserting copyright over the semantics of an API.

The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright.

That said, even if the un-synonymized API is protected by copyright (and I would generally argue otherwise), reimplementing it must be seen as fair use, all the more so an API with renamed functions.

For a more recent example: Amazon's DocumentDB reimplements the MongoDB API. This should be allowed, even though we could wish Amazon had acted otherwise.

Here is the crux of the matter: unless there is some sort of no-man's-land between the various intellectual property regimes for software, no interoperability will be allowed except that which a vendor explicitly opts into. If copyrights, trademarks, and patents overlap sufficiently, even clean-room reimplementations will be forbidden.

We can argue about which aspects of software should be protected, for how long, and by what means, but at the end of the day there must be an unprotectable area of some kind, or we're all going to be doomed to either working entirely within vendors' vertically integrated stacks, or else implementing NSidedWheelAPIFactoryFactory() all the way down to bare metal for the foreseeable future.

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

#200

Post by jcranmer » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #58

Does anyone have any indication as to how long the ruling will take for this? It's not articulated and this is a very big ruling.

For a case argued in October, a quick decision for a 9-0 case (or I guess 8-0 in the current court) that involves settling a circuit split or something else that's just simple textual analysis would come out in late November or December.

This is probably going to be complicated. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 8-0 outcome, but there's likely to be a concurring opinion or two, which will make the decision take longer. My expectation is that the opinion will come out in the January-March timeframe.

By way of comparison, Bilski v Kappos (the first big patent case in recent years) was a 9-0 case argued in November whose opinions only came out in the end-of-year opinion blitz.