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

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

#201

Post by RichardCA »

No one's discussed Lotus v. Borland yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....

The issue was that the Borland Quattro spreadsheet had the ability to emulate the menu hierarchy of Lotus 1-2-3.

So the SCOTUS was asked to weigh in on whether a software menu system represents a copyrightable expression of an idea.

What ended up happening was one justice recused himself and the eight remaining members were evenly split.

In essence, they threw up their hands and gave up. It may as well have been a coin toss.

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

#202

Post by returningfory2 »

mindcrime wrote: post #74

Maybe we get lucky and the SCOTUS ruling comes down against uncopyable API's. But while that seems questionable at the moment, it's important to remember one thing: there is always an "out" even in the "nuclear option" case and that is "have Congress change the law". It seems to me that now is the time to start thinking about putting together a mass effort to get Congress to change copyright law, to establish clearly…

+1 to this.

More generally, I feel that one of the main reasons the Supreme Court is such a powerful body nowadays, and why cases like this are considered so important, is because Congress has become so ineffectual. We have internalized the idea that the Supreme Court has the last word on every matter before it. But it emphatically does not. The Supreme Court is only the last word on constitutional cases. So many decisions - this one, certain decisions on gerrymandering - are completely overturnable by Congress.

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

#203

Post by jacobr1 »

nindalf wrote: post #183
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.

This has already happened to an extent. For example, there are bunch of API compatible implementations of s3, both oss and proprietary and most of them suggest you use the AWS sdk as a client.

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

#205

Post by beerandt »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #166
beerandt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"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…

I'm no expert on RBG, but I always pegged her as a Neo-Lib, rather than a Leftist.

Sure- but then you have to be careful defining labels.

Trying to peg a generic one dimensional (left-right) or even two dimensional (social/fiscal) political position on justices is difficult, even with loosely defined labels/ categories.

It's much easier to look at justices relative position/ rank on a per-topic basis.

Alternatively, and less useful to the general public, but very useful to SCOTUS junkies, is looking at cross tabs of how often a particular justice votes with others. Especially when they break from the publically perceived left/right voting block, which is more often than most think.

Scotusblog is full of this type of analysis for those interested:

https://www.scotusblog.com/category/empirical-scotus/

https://www.scotusblog.com/statistics/

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

#206

Post by mumblemumble »

nindalf wrote: post #183
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.

I would guess that it doesn't work out that way. The Apache license has the patent clause, but it doesn't have a comparable "API copyright" clause. Though perhaps another consequence of an Oracle win is that we end up with an Apache3 license.

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

#207

Post by Jtsummers »

jmalicki wrote: post #187
marcosdumay wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

SQL is an ISO standard. IBM would only have grounds if any part of Oracle's implementation implemented a proprietary portion of an IBM database implementation. This is the positive thing about standards, it removes ambiguity around what people can/should implement and present to users of the systems.

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

#208

Post by lifeisstillgood »

We all seem to assume that there is an obviousness defence, because we are like fish and water.

And it makes a degree of sense - take the articles example lang.java.math.sum - there are a limited number of ways "adding up an array" can be expressed in English. All of which are obvious and based around domain jargon - all very hard to copyright.

However what interests me about this case is how fast it all unravels

Is this about the math.sum part of about the lang.java part? It cannot be the math.sum because then every other language from Rust to Python gets clobbered.

If it is about the lang.java then hey maybe Oracle has a point. But it only means "you cannot copy lang.java.math.sum and that surely is an accident of language design - for example in Python the same call is math.isinf. That's the part used in the code that I write, that's the import signature. The API.

So from my pov this should be a very narrow ruling - if the import signature is not obvious and is unique (lang.java.x) then yeah fine Google, they stole your developers.

I also wonder about how transferable the obvious part is - math.ist_unendlich is fine for german speakers. Is that obvious if the rest of the manual is in English?

And if Google had gone for lang.gava.math.sum (don't tell me it was not at least discussed :-)?

It does overall seem a big fuss over a small hill of beans. If the supreme court rules in a narrow and well defined manner they just move the industry in favour of open and free, in a broad and badly defined manner they move the industry off US shores. Neither side is that bad for the software world

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

#209

Post by zucker42 »

CameronNemo wrote: post #173
zucker42 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Books are not equivalent to software because software has a functional purpose. While programming has creative elements, the primary goal of a program is to achieve certain functions (whereas the primary goal of a book is to enable creative expression or to record factual information). If I want to support a Windows program on Linux I have no choice but to implement the Windows API. Likewise, if I want to interface w…

Books can have a functional purpose. E.g. if it is a reference manual for a car. If you used the same table of contents for the reference manual, but the contents were substantially different, would that still be unlicensed copying?

Books don't have a functional purpose in the same way as software. With a book, there are many ways to state the exact same fact (and the fact itself is not protected by copyright law). With a program, there's only one way to call a particular function, or to write a function declaration that an existing program can call. The exact text used in a program is relevant to its functional purpose.

A more apt analogy in the case of a reference manual is perhaps a competing manual that presented all the same maintenance information with different words, since they would achieve the same functional purpose with different expressive content.

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

#210

Post by afwe »

miohtama wrote: post #153
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…

> This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a disaster for software everywhere. Not in the EU where there is precedence with SAP/R3 saying APIs are not copyrightable.

The tech world is in the US, not the EU.
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