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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

#241

Post by rayiner »

laurent92 wrote: post #198
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…

I don’t understand why software and other IP rights aren’t de facto open-source after 10 or 20 years, if nothing else for archive and legacy purpose, but also to encourage sustained innovation. I’m not even leftist; but even in the capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn’t help guard private companies’ rights in software. If you publish it, the recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to enforc…

> I’m not even leftist; but even in the capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn’t help guard private companies’ rights in software. If you publish it, the recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to enforce exclusive rights for a few years is already a big extraction of collective resources for private interests.

How is software, something of which there is an infinite supply that doesn’t exist until someone creates it, more of a “collective resource” than my back yard, which was here before I was born and will remain here after I die?

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

#242

Post by aninteger »

c-smile wrote: post #221
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…

> Should Oracle win this case, ... Free Software ... Hmmm... First Free Software project that will dye after this is WINE that implements Windows API ( https://www.winehq.org/ )

Maybe just in the USA. But also Microsoft is on Google's side here. Also doesn't Microsoft's WSL also have this problem as a "reverse WINE" ?

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

#243

Post by rusk »

jmalicki wrote: post #214
Jtsummers wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The IBM implementation of SQL far predates the ISO standard. Does something being standardized somehow relinquish the copyright? The idea of APIs being copyrightable is new, has IBM somehow relinquished its copyright claims for SQL to ISO? This article discusses the possibility at length https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/before-it-sued-g...

I think you have to have demonstrated that you have taken steps to protect your copyright. I’d imagine submitting to a standard would relinquish that. Patents on the other hand ...

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

#244

Post by alfalfasprout »

c-smile wrote: post #221
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…

> Should Oracle win this case, ... Free Software ... Hmmm... First Free Software project that will dye after this is WINE that implements Windows API ( https://www.winehq.org/ )

Not at all. Please read page 14 of the amicus curiae brief in support of Google by Microsoft (https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-956/128381/2020...). Here is the relevant paragraph:

""" In another example from the 1990s, an open-source developer created a program called WINE, which al- lowed developers to enable Windows applications to run on computers that used the Linux open-source system, without explicit authorization from Microsoft. Gratz & Lemley, supra, at 611. To create WINE, the developer “use[d] the same hierarchy of function names” of various Windows APIs. Id. at 612. Years later, Microsoft created “the inverse of WINE,” reimplementing the structure of certain Linux APIs to create the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a program that allowed Linux programs to run on Windows. Ibid. The Windows-Linux experience shows that reuse of functional code is a “two- way street” that benefits both the original creator and the follow-on developer—and ultimately the consumer. """

Not to mention there's no monetary chest at the end of that fight (and the creation of WSL wouldn't bode well for them if they were to make a case at all).

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

#245

Post by pier25 »

c-smile wrote: post #221
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…

> Should Oracle win this case, ... Free Software ... Hmmm... First Free Software project that will dye after this is WINE that implements Windows API ( https://www.winehq.org/ )

And what about Xamarin?

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

#246

Post by rusk »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #169
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…

I look forward to all the unnecessary type casting we will get to do so public interfaces don't infringe. System.Out.Println(byte []) is my new favorite function on Android.

Would a tool to do this be illegal?

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

#247

Post by pvorb »

hugi wrote: post #228
xoxoy wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google lawyer should be fired. I can’t believe you’d put the best of the best in front of the SC and the guy didn’t even sound like he could describe what an API actually is in non-technical terms. I don’t see how he represented the best legal representation Google could buy.

Indeed. This was bad representation to the point that I'm wondering if it was intentional. Google might have recently realized that, as a monopoly, fighting for API freedom perhaps isn't in their best interest.

That would have been an expensive realization, but it sounds like a reasonable explanation.

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

#248

Post by marcosdumay »

zepto wrote: post #95
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…

You say GNU would not exist, which is true in it’s current form. But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have had a Unix-like (although not strictly compatible) free system. It’s also true that Safari couldn’t have used XMLHttpRequest unless Microsoft had licensed it . But that might have sped up the incorporation of an open standard alternative. It would definitely have created a different history to the one we have now i…

> Unix-like

You mean something that implements all the APIs that the Bell Labs never licensed to anybody?

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

#249

Post by pvorb »

rusk wrote: post #246
DubiousPusher wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I look forward to all the unnecessary type casting we will get to do so public interfaces don't infringe. System.Out.Println(byte []) is my new favorite function on Android.

Would a tool to do this be illegal?

This tool would -- sort of -- implement an API.

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

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

returningfory2 wrote: post #202
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 dec…

> The Supreme Court is only the last word on constitutional cases.

No more so than statutory or any other cases; just as regulation can be changed by the executive and statute can be changed by the Congress, the Constitution can be amended by the process set out in the document itself.

The Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the current state of the law, but no law that it applies, including the Constitution, is immutable.

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