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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

#351

Post by vaccinator »

ubercow13 wrote: post #26
tasubotadas wrote: post #10

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.

Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.

You cant be serious...

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

#352

Post by ghaff »

lloeki wrote: post #323
ghaff wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There can still be advantages to being explicit as I understand it to enforce copyright/collect damages. For example, most people don't actually deposit copies in circumstances where they're technically supposed to.

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

#353

Post by nl »

treis wrote: post #230
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I've read, Wine would quite clearly be illegal if the court rules in favor of Oracle. I am very worried about this case.

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.…

> 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. They did not use the Api to create a compatability layer. It was used as a starting point to make their own copy of Java.

This isn't an argument that has been made in court in anyway, and Google's use of the Java language hasn't been questioned.

Google could have used the Java language with completely different APIs (google.lang instead of java.lang for example). It's the APIs that this case is about.

Also, the key analogy is wrong anyway: while Android used java.lang and java.util and other related APIs, the key functionality of the phone was accessible via custom APIs that aren't copied. Note that the "interoperability" argument was lost by Google because of this exact thing.

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

#354

Post by cyphar »

dragonwriter wrote: post #311
TheDong wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> OpenJDK, including the java standard library, is GPL. It's open source. The code at issue is pre-OpenJDK, and wasn't open source when used (though much of it may now also be available in OpenJDK, not that Google uses it under the GPL, or claims to, anyhow.)

Sun released Java under the GPL in 2006 and most of JDK in mid-2007, but the first release of Android was in 2008. Or is the issue that they were developing it behind closed doors while it was still proprietary, even though they never distributed it to anyone?

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

#355

Post by Polylactic_acid »

logicOnly wrote: post #59
tasubotadas wrote: post #10

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.

IP was never about society. It was a tool for the rich to create a monopoly on a product. IP disproportionately helps organizations rather than individuals. And the major owners of those organizations are the 0.01% class

IMO IP protection should be short lived. Imagine if copyright ownership lasted 10 years. The profits made on producing a video game would be almost identical since almost all profit is made in the first few years and half of the lifetime profit is in the first week.

What it would mean is the games that we all played as kids but are long since out of store shelves would now be free to distribute.

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

#356

Post by salawat »

kubanczyk wrote: post #333
gregorygoc wrote: post #328

I’ve read through the entire comments section and I’m very surprised there’s no post saying Oracle is pure evil. So here is one: f those guys.

Tsk, tsk, that's an argumentum ad hominem.

And thus the comment thread is complete. Pack it up, folks. We're done here.

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

#357

Post by cyphar »

pjmlp wrote: post #265
raverbashing wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. But Oracle doesn't care one bit about anything else that's not Oracle. Though it is still to be known how many reimplemented APIs from others does Oracle have in their products

Nope, they pay for ISO which Google hasn't done for Java.

You don't have to pay for ISO to implement an ISO standard. In addition, Oracle released their database software in 1979 but SQL only became an ANSI standard in 1986 (and an ISO standard in 1987) so they did originally reimplement an API which wasn't a public standard.

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

#358

Post by dragonwriter »

cyphar wrote: post #354
dragonwriter wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OpenJDK, including the java standard library, is GPL. It's open source. The code at issue is pre-OpenJDK, and wasn't open source when used (though much of it may now also be available in OpenJDK, not that Google uses it under the GPL, or claims to, anyhow.)

Sun released Java under the GPL in 2006 and most of JDK in mid-2007, but the first release of Android was in 2008. Or is the issue that they were developing it behind closed doors while it was still proprietary, even though they never distributed it to anyone?

The first public release of Android was a beta in 2007 (also, layer in 2007, the first SDK preview was released), and it was released to OHA members before that.

But the GPL is irrelevant, Google has never distributed under the GPL terms. That whatever it was doing was not under a Sun/Oracle license is not in dispute.

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

#359

Post by jcranmer »

orangecat wrote: post #252
jasode wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Scratch the "almost", the developer of java.lang.Math explicitly said in one of the briefs that he did it for exactly that reason.

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

#360

Post by incompatible »

ubercow13 wrote: post #26
tasubotadas wrote: post #10

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP. This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.

Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.

Who can say for sure what would have happened if Linus had used an MIT-style license instead. Linux would not necessarily have failed. But if, for example, a proprietary version had become dominant, that would have been enabled by copyright law. It's not the existence of copyright law that allows Linux to succeed as an open-source project.
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