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Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#181

Post by jgilias »

To me the best explanation of an Application Programming Interface (spelling it out on purpose) is really the comparison with industrial machinery. It's really the switches, knobs and levers of a machine that you use to make it do something. I get it that an API being textual throws non-technical people off. But for a programmer functionally there's not much difference between a physical object, like a steering wheel, and some API call to invoke. They are both just something you use to interact with the underlying system. Hence the term.

It's sort of perplexing that Google would send someone who can't explain this point of view well.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#182

Post by lern_too_spel »

SloopJon wrote: post #14

I saw one question from Gorsuch quoted in reports about the arguments that bothered me: "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?" macOS and iOS (and indeed Apple itself) would not exist as we know them today, if at all, without very liberal cross pollination of APIs. In a…

Darwin copies Unix APIs from AT&T. They have engaged in this kind of copying. They just haven't been sued about it.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#183

Post by nindalf »

doesnotexist wrote: post #128

Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to d…

AWS licenses it's client library as under the Apache License. (https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java/blob/master/LICENSE.txt) Doesn't that mean anyone can build an interoperable service? I can then benefit from other cloud providers implementing the same API. I don't need access to AWS' source code, I wasn't going to deploy a private cloud anyway. All I want is robust competition.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#184

Post by protomyth »

Aqueous wrote: post #6

This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a disaster for software everywhere. If APIs become copyrightable, what happens to any open source software the implements a proprietary API? Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible to teach them the difference between interface and implementation within the parameters…

Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this.

Justice Breyer's QWERTY analogy was pretty good.

Also, Google's lawyer is supposed to supply that framework in oral and the brief.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#185

Post by Shakahs »

ballenf wrote: post #164
fdye wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really sucks is this was a perfect time for a lawyer to use Justice Thomas' analogy to better explain the difference. I would have tried something like: "Close your honor, but let me expand on this further. Imagine instead that your opponent publishes their calls and they are regularly available to all individuals of the general public. However, while they may describe a call for going long, they do not give any…

I think the playbook is just a bad analogy because it misses that point of what an interface is. It's the means of connecting two dissimilar mechanisms. A translation layer. I'd have argued it's more like copyrighting doorknob placement (opposite hinge, at hand height) and operation (twisting) on doors vs. patenting a novel mechanism inside the doorknob. A football playbook is more like the blueprints of the inside o…

I think the QWERTY analogy quoted in the article is perfect. QWERTY is on typewriters, computers, and smartphones. Same interface, completely different implementations. And this is technology that everyday people are familiar with.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#186

Post by smnrchrds »

dmoy wrote: post #127
sterwill wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyrights are not patents, and your link asserts that the Robertson screw design is patented, not copyrighted. The Google vs. Oracle case is about copyrights.

A relevant point here that patents expire in ~decade or two, whereas copyright expires when Disney tells you it can expire (which is never). Not that expiring in a decade or two would help in the area of tech where stuff moves so fast.

It helps. Didn't MP3 patents expire recently? MP3 is far from obsolete.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#187

Post by jmalicki »

marcosdumay wrote: post #180
doesnotexist wrote: post #128

Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to d…

Maybe after the dust settles. But you can bet lots of people will reenact the SCO saga, and now they won't have to lie on every claim.

I would love to see IBM try to sue Oracle for the entirety of its history of database revenues over its use of their SQL API...

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#188

Post by ianlevesque »

rlewkov wrote: post #161
nradov wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really the court's responsibility. There is no legal definition of "interface" or "implementation". They're just trying to interpret a gray area in the law and it could come down either way. Any real solution will have to be legislated.

"Any real solution will have to be legislated. " So true. Congress can amend the particular section of the code to explicitly exclude APIs from being copyrightable ... if they want to.

I thought Congress only existed to appoint judges.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#190

Post by xxpor »

beerandt wrote: post #94
Aqueous wrote: post #6

This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a disaster for software everywhere. If APIs become copyrightable, what happens to any open source software the implements a proprietary API? Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible to teach them the difference between interface and implementation within the parameters…

>>"that the conservative majority is predisposed to treat everything as property..." This is misleading at best. For example: RBG, despite her left-leaning reputation, was easily one of, if not the , most pro-copyright and pro-IP justices on the bench. (Relatedly, she also was pretty pro big business, which rarely fits the portrayed narrative.) Not all areas of law, especially at the Supreme Court level, easily trans…

Everyone freaks out about social issues with SCOTUS (which is understandable), but their real impact is on economics. The destruction they've laid on the labor movement and help for big businesses is immense.

Just look at the commentary around overturning Chevron deference and non-delegation. Absolutely apocalyptic.

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