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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

#321

Post by dlubarov »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #274
Spivak wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Thanks, that's interesting! It seems reasonable—if Google was explicitly trying to enable compatibility, that should be allowed, whereas if they were just trying to save a buck, that should be illegal. Of course, in reality Google's decision was probably a little of both, right? They selected a technology based on a wide range of factors, including development costs and compatibility. I'm still concerned that a decis…

> Of course, in reality Google's decision was probably a little of both, right?

I wouldn't think that Google's development costs were part of the decision. There aren't that many Java APIs -- as the article says, it's ~11k lines of definitions -- so Oracle is seeking ~$818k per line. Assuming Google's lawyers predicted that there was some risk of a lawsuit like this, any engineering costs associated with redesigning the APIs would just be negligible compared to the legal risk.

One could argue that it is quite difficult to design a good API, but Java's APIs are frankly full of mistakes: Date/Calendar, immutable collections with no type safety, "optional" methods like Iterator.remove, etc. It wouldn't take a team of world-class engineers to come up with something better with the benefit of hindsight.

On the other hand, developer familiarity and compatibility with existing Java libraries could have had a significant impact on Android's adoption. I think that was what justified the legal risks.

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

#322

Post by treis »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #309
treis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're clearly different. In this example Google independently developed a language and made it compatible with the JVM. In the real world Google wanted Java and didn't like the licensing terms. So they copied the Java API and from that starting point built out their own version of Java.

But "making it compatible with the JVM" would involve implementing the Java standard library, right? Recognizing terms like "java.lang.String" or "java.lang.Math.max" and doing the right thing? To do that, aren't you creating a copy of the Java API?

Nobody is arguing that you can't copy the API if it's fair use. Copying the API in order to make a copy of the software isn't fair use.

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

#323

Post by lloeki »

ghaff wrote: post #227
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, brain cramp. I was thinking of patent, not copyright. Until State Street , nobody thought you could patent software, so nobody tried. Copyright... of the top of my head, I don't recall much about copyrightability of software.

There was still controversy about software copyrightability in 1974. That said, I expect IBM still explicitly copyrighted their implementation of SQL (and licensed it [1]) as they had first started doing with some of the System/360 software during the prior decade. Note that, in 1974, you still had to explicitly copyright something; it didn't just happen automatically like today. [1] As a side note, IBM may not have…

> it didn't just happen automatically like today.

... in the US of A.

Berne convention started a little bit over a full century before that.

Impressive that the superfluous “need” for the Copyright (c) YYYY notice still persists to this day in the mind of many.

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

#324

Post by [deleted] »

TheDong wrote: post #272
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…

> If Oracle wins, you couldn't reimplement a compatible version of anything that's not open source It's worse than that. OpenJDK, including the java standard library, is GPL. It's open source. Oracle is claiming that even though source code defining the API is open source, they retain copyright to the API itself.. regardless of the open source implementation of the API by themselves. If this case goes through, you wo…

[deleted]

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

#325

Post by monocasa »

wtn wrote: post #320
espadrine wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to WINE if it is illegal to use the same names Kernel32 does? I was wondering where would the Oracle win hurt most, and I think there is worse than WINE. The Unix syscalls would have been Bell Labs’ copyright. That copyright was sold to Novell, which was sold to… Micro Focus International plc? So this British consulting company that is, according to its website, “powering digital transformation”, could…

4.4BSD was cleared in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc....

That was only under the assumption that the APIs themselves weren't copyrightable.

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

#326

Post by monocasa »

webmaven wrote: post #199
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…

> 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 o…

That's how they're trying to make copyright work though. The protection being asserted here is over the "Structure, Sequence, and Organization" of the API.

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

#327

Post by judge2020 »

pjmlp wrote: post #264
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

SQL is an ISO standard, which Oracle like everyone else also pays for.

You can make an open-source database that uses the SQL language without paying a dime to anyone or signing any contracts. You don't have to pay for the ISO standard document to implement it - you can just infer behavior based on what you already know about sql.

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

#329

Post by vernie »

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…

It's always the case that if Oracle wins we lose.

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

#330

Post by throwaway373438 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #298
throwaway373438 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why Google had to copy the interface -- otherwise their runtime would not operate with other existing products. As you can see given your example, the analogy is a perfect fit. Your argument that the copying is once-removed is unfortunately irrelevant to copyright law.

You're saying a car that's 1 inch narrower somehow wouldn't fit the same roads?

What does "1 inch narrower" mean to you, in the context of this analogy? Are you suggesting the interfaces have different names? Different sized arguments?

None of those things would work.

Besides, creating minor differences do not solve this problem as they would still be derivative works.

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