Can't google just buy Oracle, and done with this bullshit ? And at the same time land opportunity to move all their enterprise customers to cloud ?
Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
411–420 of 433 posts
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and see a carve-out exception in statute. By the same token, if we are rejecting judge made law that isn't expressly in the statute, if technies want APIs (or, for that matter, computer programs!) to be copyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and get an explicit carve-in put in the statute. As it is, the only things explicitly in…
The law specifically protects programs as a form of literary work. An API declaration is a fragment of a program, which is copyrightable under statute, just like chapter titles and headings are fragments of a literary work. API declarations constitute expression of an idea which has many ways to be expressed. And... even if a small part of a larger work is copied without authroization or license, then the copyright h…
Please at least attempt to address the gaping holes in your arguments when posting.
When a work as a whole is copyrightable, that does not automatically mean that any subset of that work is copyrightable. You need to actually explain why and how your examples of chapter titles and headings are still eligible for copyright protection.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I have a bit of trouble with the concept "the threshhold of too much", too, as it applies to this case. Google copied or paraphrased essentially _all_ of the text of interfaces they used from Java libraries Oracle is trying to argue that just because you intentionally left a bunch of implementation detail out because it isn't relevant toward transforming something like the Java API's to a new context, it should stil…
Oracle's argument isn't legally circular or anything like that. It's actually very strong, which is why it's problematic: the industry status-quo consensus that you can't copyright APIs has no obvious basis in copyright law beyond the notion that you can't copyright "facts". Is an API a collection of facts? I would hate to be a lawyer tasked with arguing this one in front of the Supremes. Programmers sweat bullets ov…
>In the long run it's harder to say.
The easiest solution if the software industry wants to preserve the status quo is to just lobby Congress to amend the laws to explicitly distinguish interfaces from implementations.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC they were going to use the reference impl of Java but Sun wanted to inject themselves and the Java brand all over Android. Plus Sun couldn't design a decent UI to save their lives, so Android probably wouldn't have been successful if Google had allowed Sun a large role in the platform.
Actually they did, but too many developers are lazy to buy books and apply their learnings. http://filthyrichclients.org/ From the same Chet Haase and Romain Guy that went into Android's GUI framework after Sun went under. And for mobile there was https://docs.oracle.com/javame/dev-tools/lwuit-1.3/LWUIT_Dev... Plus, Google could have done just like any other OS vendor does with ISO C and ISO C++, plus whatever OS API…
Yeah I don't think the problem with Sun's UI stuff was an individual or a group but probably big corp politics.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and see a carve-out exception in statute. By the same token, if we are rejecting judge made law that isn't expressly in the statute, if technies want APIs (or, for that matter, computer programs!) to be copyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and get an explicit carve-in put in the statute. As it is, the only things explicitly in…
The law specifically protects programs as a form of literary work. An API declaration is a fragment of a program, which is copyrightable under statute, just like chapter titles and headings are fragments of a literary work. API declarations constitute expression of an idea which has many ways to be expressed. And... even if a small part of a larger work is copied without authroization or license, then the copyright h…
> The law specifically protects programs as a form of literary work.
No, it doesn't (it's true that it implicitly does so with limitations on the protection that can be applied to them later than where it specifies what is protected, but it does not explictly include them in the list of what is protected, or explictly define them as “literary works” which are explicitly protected.) Computer programs (whether source code or otherwise) are processes. They aren't literary works describing processes. It's easy enough to see this is true.
If you change the expression of a literary work but not the process it describes, if someone is executing the process based on the new description as part of a larger set of processes, there is no impact—the process itself is unaffected.
If you change the supposed “expression” of a piece of computer source code, say by changing the names used for functions and arguments either that it calls or that it defines, and then compile it with other software it normally links with, it either breaks or creates object code that behaves differently at runtime. There is no “literary expression” that is not part of the process code describes, whether it relates to the compile time process the code describes, the link time process, or the runtime process. Code is pure process, and not only is process not explicitly protected it is explicitly not protected by copyright.
> API declarations constitute expression of an idea which has many ways to be expressed.
No, they are a concrete embodiment of a process (well, a set of potentially compile time, link time, runtime, and maybe other processes), and any change alters the process embodied materially. That's even more obviously the case with API definitions than it is with code generally, since the whole use of API declarations is to formally, mechanically define the functionality of the interface between separate pieces of code.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#416This gives me memories of SCO Linux.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're smart people and these are not hard concepts.
Of course they are smart people but they are also quite backwards when it comes to technology and I doubt they would take the time to learn the real differences between APIs, code, algorithm implementations vs theory, etc. They will probably try to use a car analogy in their final arguments and rulings.
as long as its not a horse..
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#418I have what's maybe a stupid question, but this is a stupid issue, so let's give it a whirl. If writing Java programs is okay, but the issue is copying the API, would it be okay to take 10,000 popular Java programs, read through their byte code, and use that to construct a set of classes and functions that those programs would need to run? It would, of course, be a nearly complete subset of the Java API, but it would…
That's the argument that always springs to mind for me, as well, and I'm curious why Google's lawyers haven't used it since it seems obvious. (That's the whole point of this, after all: we're implementing an agreed-upon interface that application developers are using. Implementing an interface happens all the time outside of computers and is not a difficult concept to turn into shitty car metaphors if you really must).
So, the interface is published in every consuming application. If you look at an application which is missing a shared object and figure out how to implement the missing pieces in your own version of that shared object, you've re-implemented (part of) an API. So the question is, in doing so, have you infringed their copyright?
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the compatibility layer be infringing copyright?
No, it isn't providing api, merely using api (but providing it's own api). If using an api was copyrightable, our civilzation would collapse.
And how will you use that API? If it is based on things like headers, you can no longer have a copy of that header to refer against. The compiler can no longer read that header into memory, as that's a copy.
The use of an API will be copyrightable too. Now you understand the depths of the disaster this will be.
This is a legal apocalypse for software.
Re: Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court
#420It'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?
You'll need a license for that if APIs are now copyrightable.
Your toy language cannot read the API information into memory to compile with it, because that would be copying it.