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

281–290 of 433 posts

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

#281

Post by jcranmer »

foota wrote: post #275
jcranmer wrote: post #246

Oral arguments have already happened: https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri... I wasn't able to listen to all of the arguments, but some general takeaways I had: * The justices seemed to be asking mostly technical legal questions of Google (e.g., discuss merger doctrine) and mostly doom-and-gloom questions of Oracle (e.g., how does your argument impact QWERTY keyboards?). This suggests to me th…

Huh, that last note is pretty interesting. You seem pretty tuned in, do you know when we might be able to expect a written decision?

The decision can theoretically come anytime between now and the end of next June, largely dependent on how complex the decision is. My personal guess is somewhere between January and March of next year.

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

#282

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tzs wrote: post #211
Doddler wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

A book is subject to veru different considerations - it has a plot, main characters, and other characteristics that you would be copying. All of these are a protected product of the author's creativity.

There is no plot in an API, no main characters, etc. It communicates matters of technical nature, and there aren't five different way of writing 'sqrt()' or whatever. It is more appropriately compares to architechtural blueprints and other technical documents.

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

#283

Post by [deleted] »

foota wrote: post #275
jcranmer wrote: post #246

Oral arguments have already happened: https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri... I wasn't able to listen to all of the arguments, but some general takeaways I had: * The justices seemed to be asking mostly technical legal questions of Google (e.g., discuss merger doctrine) and mostly doom-and-gloom questions of Oracle (e.g., how does your argument impact QWERTY keyboards?). This suggests to me th…

Huh, that last note is pretty interesting. You seem pretty tuned in, do you know when we might be able to expect a written decision?

[deleted]

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

#284

Post by tmccrary55 »

gpm wrote: post #219
ford_o wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yep although the openjdk stdlib is licensed with a linking exception, so you can relicense it entirely when linking against it.

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

#285

Post by tmccrary55 »

bluGill wrote: post #68
tapoxi wrote: post #14

If this (somehow) succeeds, could IBM sue Oracle over SQL compatibility?

IBM contributed SQL to international standards (Or is it just ANSI? I don't care too look that up), so probably not. It isn't clear though, joining ISO generally requires you to license your patents for a "reasonable price" (Reasonably for a big company, tens to thousands of dollars....), but of course IBM didn't agree to that back then, so would courts say IBM implicitly agreed to the standards of the day where it w…

Although I don't think it was a standard when Oracle reimplemented it originally.

Kind of like how Java is now open source and Google can use it but Oracle's lawsuit is about what Google did before it was open source.

But I'd guess there's some kind of statute of limitations or similar for infringement that old.

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

#286

Post by zeroxfe »

fierarul wrote: post #158
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.

Thing is Google were also nasty towards Sun and helped it go under quite well. In many ways this is karma but too bad there's so much externality to it.

As much as I loved Sun workstations and Solaris, I'm pretty sure Sun went under all by itself.

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

#287

Post by getpolarized »

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…

Here's a good analogy for non-programers.

You're building a new car company.

You see all the existing cars, the roads, and the garages.

So you measure the width of the car and the garage and you decide that the car should be exactly 6' wide.

Then you ship your car. Enjoy 15 years of market success.

Then you find that Oracle created the first cars and says they have copyright on the width of your car.

That's how stupid this is...

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

#288

Post by tsimionescu »

salawat wrote: post #191
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.…

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.

Refactoring is somewhat similar to translation, and it similarly does nothing to affect the notion of copyright. A novel is copyright-able even though it can be mechanically translated into a different language.

The fact remains that APIs are creative works. This can also be seen from discussions about APIs in the industry - everyone knows that the Unix APIs are often seen as elegant while the Windows APIs are seen as ugly. The C++ people love the design of their iterators and algorithms and data structures and believe it is superior to Haskell's equivalents.

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

#289

Post by chowells »

jcranmer wrote: post #209
bismuthsalt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the Sun engineer did indeed copy from UNIX to some mild degree The line between "inspired from" and "copied from" is a fine line indeed. When does a term stop being proprietary and enter the vernacular of a specific profession or of humanity at large? I lean rather liberal on this question, and I hope the law will too. OTOH, what is blatant theft is for your 'original' work to overlap 99%, in both names and s…

Look up the names of the functions in java.lang.Math. They are exactly the names and semantics used in the libm functions. Even down to the presence of the atan2 function which computes tan¯¹(y / x). (You could also point out that JavaScript literally lifts java.lang.Math and java.util.Date into JS code as well, down to Date.getYear returning the Gregorian year - 1900).

Almost completely irrelevant side note: atan2 is immensely useful because it actually does more than calculate the arctangent. It handles all the corner cases in converting a 2d vector to an angle. There's no chance of division by zero, it gets the answer into the correct quadrant automatically, and so on. Those things add up to an annoying series of if statements if all you have is an arctangent function.

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

#290

Post by regulation_d »

npsimons wrote: post #250
regulation_d wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me very intuitive that a lack of IP protection of some sort discourages innovation. I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely. The policy concerns around IP protection for both patent and copyright are clear: the minimum amount of protection that doesn't discourage innovation. Lawmakers know or should know that we all benefit from a…

> I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely. Your lack of imagination is disappointing, and also hints at a failure of empathy.

There are so many ways of distributing thought and expression with little to no cost other than the time and effort of the creator. In practice, books almost always require more. I'm struggling to see how using a blog instead, is some sort of "failure of empathy".

But I guess the broader point remains, even if only 20% of potential authors are, like me, so evil that they wouldn't devote a year of their lives to writing a book that they couldn't monetize in some way, well that's still represents a 20% decrease in innovation on some level.

Post reply on HN