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

#211

Post by tzs » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:30 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.

That's true, but not relevant to the point of the comment you are replying to. Taking a copy of an existing work, and simply replacing words with synonyms and renaming characters would still count as copying. Maybe there would be enough creativity in your choice of synonyms to make your work separately copyrightable as a derivative work, but that would still require permission of the existing work's copyright owner.

Producing a new work that happens to be similar to, or even word for word identical to an existing work, if you truly created it yourself from scratch without taking anything from the existing work, would not be copying.

As a practical matter, unless you had extraordinary proof that you really had never read Harry Potter books, watched the movies, read the plot summaries on Wikipedia, attended a party shortly after one of the books came out where everyone was talking about it, you would lose in a copyright infringement lawsuit. If you work is very similar to Harry Potter and you had access to Harry Potter, that's sufficient for the plaintiff to make their case, switching the burden to you to prove that you did not copy it.

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

#212

Post by slaymaker1907 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:30 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…

I think if Oracle wins, what really needs to happen is we need to begin lobbying congress to explicitly exclude APIs from copyright protection. I think that this could definitely work, particularly since so much software relies on APIs not being copyrighted.

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

#213

Post by zwischenzug » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #206

asah wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes and no. Yes, Oracle was a database with a SQL API. Yes, SQL was invented by IBM. No, it wasn't copyrighted by IBM, because at the time, nobody thought you could do that.

I thought you couldn't 'copyright' something?

I understood copyright to be something you had if you had created it.

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

#214

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #194

simiones wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, you have access to the oral arguments? Source?

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

#215

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

Kednicma wrote: post #176

Zigurd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

Reductio ad absurdum. The hint is in the name. That's the difference between law and math.

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

#216

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

strbean wrote: post #207

snarf21 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the specific claims and their validity, one fact remains. Oracle bought Sun for the sole purpose of suing Google . Full stop. I used to date someone involved in the case when it was just getting started. Oracle can go pound sand.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Sun licensed Java under an open license that would have allowed Google to use these interfaces without issue, if they had met certain criteria for supporting the full Java platform. Google essential thought "Well, we have too much bloat, and these parts are totally unneeded in our platform, so we're going to strip them out." Oracle's lawsuit is so bad-faith it is laughable.

I seem to recall Sun refusing to allow Apache Harmony's implementation of the Java stdlib to be certified, or didn't allow access to the TCK or something like that. It may have seemed at the time like trying for an official certification for Android was pointless.

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

#217

Post by webmaven » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

totaldude87 wrote: post #19

I think we would be better off, if we follow the pharmacy world. Like they have full controls over a new vaccine for x years and then it becomes generic! Problem is that technology space moves so fast that if x year term is say 5-10 years , that would nullify entire process!

> I think we would be better off, if we follow the pharmacy world. Like they have full controls over a new vaccine for x years and then it becomes generic! Problem is that technology space moves so fast that if x year term is say 5-10 years , that would nullify entire process!

That is, in fact, how copyright works, and the original term was 14 years. Since then, the term has been extended several times in the name of "harmonization", and the term is currently so long it might as well be infinite, as far as software is concerned.

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

#218

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

partingshots wrote: post #168

Why does Oracle care so much about Android in the first place? Does it even make any money for Google?

It can make a lot of money for Oracle (by suing Google). That, and only that, is why Oracle cares.

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

#219

Post by gpm » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

ford_o wrote: post #173

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?

It would be a derivative work of the api, so per Oracle's argument you would be violating their copyright absent a license. (You could use the gpl OpenJDK license if your code was GPLed, I think).

You could try and argue fair use, and it would be distinct from the case at hand so you might win, but fair use is always a fact intensive analysis and it's certainly not obvious that you would win.

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

#220

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

srtjstjsj wrote: post #23

totaldude87 wrote: post #19

I think we would be better off, if we follow the pharmacy world. Like they have full controls over a new vaccine for x years and then it becomes generic! Problem is that technology space moves so fast that if x year term is say 5-10 years , that would nullify entire process!

That's exactly how Copyright works, which is to be expected because Copyrights and Patents are governed by the same overarching law.

Except that copyright is 95 years. That's insanely long for software.