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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

#251

Post by pjmlp »

bitL wrote: post #228
pjmlp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC IBM was in the play as well, but yes. I guess Google didn't want to inherit all the internal late-SUN problems so they passed on a chance to own it. Now Google had to switch to an alternate strategy utilizing JetBrains for Android.

IBM withdraw their proposal shortly after coming into the buy.

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

#252

Post by orangecat »

jasode wrote: post #121
mantap wrote: post #86

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. 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…

>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…

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.

Which is amusing, because Sun almost certainly chose "max" in part for "compatibility" with the C standard library.

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

#253

Post by CobrastanJorji »

raphlinus wrote: post #223

My wish is that this case be decided clearly. Either APIs can be copyrighted, or they cannot. Either outcome has potentially good consequences, for open source in particular. Obviously if APIs cannot be copyrighted, then a ton of open source work geared towards making things compatible remains viable. Wine is one of the most obvious, but I can think of many others. Efforts to port CUDA code to non-Nvidia hardware. A…

> If APIs can be copyrighted, then buyers now know that there's a single-source risk for any API that's not released under a permissive open source license.

Buyers won't be very motivated to care because they are consuming the original product, not competing with it. The first mover to release an API frequently has no interest in allowing compatible, competing offerings to exist. It's the second mover, the competition, that desperately wants to be compatible with the first offering, so that they can effectively compete for the business of the customer who bought the original product.

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

#254

Post by colejohnson66 »

zaphar wrote: post #224
novaleaf wrote: post #205

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. I think you are a bit off the mark on this line. (mostly agree with the rest of your post) Google's goal was to make a white-room implementation of java that was 100% api compatible. This was explicitly to avoid licensing Java while still being Java compatible.

I don't think this is true. Google doesn't let you run java that was compiled for the JVM. They have an entirely different mechanism that is not the jvm for their java code to compile to. All they did was port the language to a new compile target. When you port a language over you also port the standard library or at least the parts that you need. This is standard across the industry. Every language implementation do…

Assuming Oracle wins, could the people at WG21 sue anyone who implemented C++? They wouldn’t as they work on the compilers, but I’m asking in theory.

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

#255

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

user5994461 wrote: post #20
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…

Then imagine the outrage from European companies and users getting hit by this ludicrous US copyright thing that doesn't apply to them (the European court rejected oracle claims long ago).

European users get hit by plenty of ludicrous things of their own making anyway.

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

#256

Post by colejohnson66 »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #212
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.

Or we could have companies Oracle copied sue them. For example: IBM for SQL.

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

#257

Post by pojntfx »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #22
pojntfx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. IMHO IP law is based on a moral and not a utilitarian basis, and as we know from almost all recent FLOSS projects especially in Cloud (Linux, Kubernetes, ...) IP is just a massive hindrance to productivity and has a net negative effect on the industry.

The US Constitution explicitly cites utilitarian goals in the Copyright Clause.

Sure! But the US Constitution wasn't written in a time where software was a thing, right?

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

#258

Post by treis »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #243
treis wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine makes programs written for Windows work on Linux. The key difference is that Linux is an independently developed system. The extent that wine copies Windows code is limited to a compatability layer. It doesn't transform Linux into just a copy of Windows. In contrast, Google didn't have their own independently developed programming language. They needed one so they copied the Java api and created one from there.…

If I'm understanding your argument, if Google independently developed a programming language, and then they implemented a compatibility layer that accepted Java bytecode invoking Java APIs and translated it in realtime to their not-Java programming language, then this would be okay? How would such a programming language be detectably different from being an implementation of Java?

>If I'm understanding your argument, if Google independently developed a programming language, and then they implemented a compatibility layer that accepted Java bytecode invoking Java APIs and translated it in realtime to their not-Java programming language, then this would be okay?

Yes

>How would such a programming language be detectably different from being an implementation of Java?

It would have it's own unique API. As an example, Ruby can run on the JVM via JRuby and it's clear that Ruby is a different language than Java.

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

#259

Post by Spivak »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #184
simiones wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is actually, and the court argued as such: if Android had been compatible with Java programs, Google could have claimed a fair-use exemption. Since Android can't run many Java programs, by design, they can't claim such an exemption. WINE could very likely win a legal battle through claiming a fair-use exemption (of course, if the case fails, they wouldn't have to go to court at all).

Why is the distinction between "runs with zero changes" and "runs with minimal changes"—or even just "runs with fewer changes"—so critical? Where is the line? Is Android "compatible" with Java programs if those programs need to be recompiled first, but no source edits are necessary? What if source edits are necessary, but can be automated? What if recompiling isn't necessary, but you need to hex edit the binary? "Com…

Because the actual implementation isn't what the courts are looking for. This is a case about Google's intention for copying the Java API. Oracle is claiming that Google copied their API because it was easier than designing a new language; Google is claiming that they did it for interoperability reasons.

There is no distinction between the two because these things are presented as evidence of Google's intent, it's not proof. There's no line. Google's case would be much stronger is Android-Java could run most Java software unmodified but it doesn't mean they'll lose just because it's not true.

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

#260

Post by kiliancs »

arethuza wrote: post #94
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 used to know a very bright chap who refused to use meaningful identifiers - his argument was mainly that you could never capture enough information in an identifier to be really accurate so you shouldn't even try. Nice chap, but fortunately he was a school friend and not a colleague! Maybe we should just use GUIDs for everything :-)

You should check out Unison https://www.unisonweb.org/
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