351–360 of 771 posts
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…
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.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle wins on copyright (I think it is almost impossible for Google to count to 5 on their merger doctrine argument) but I disagree that fair use is a long shot. The justices that brought up the case’s procedural history were all unanimously skeptical that the Federal Circuit correctly set aside the fair use verdict in favor of Google. I think the most likely outcome of this case (especial…
I agree. Personally, I espouse the "copyright should not exist at all" viewpoint. However, I think in the current legal framework, APIs are clearly copyrightable. However, re-implementing the APIs should obviously be allowed under fair use. Remember that copyright exists solely for the purposes of increasing the production of otherwise-easily-copyable works that take time to create but then are "worthless" (i.e. the…
I don't see how this type of creative expression is any more or less worthy of protection than any other code.
There are some other silly things mentioned in the proceedings. One is about monopolies, clearly that's wrong because there are multiple platforms and Apple and Microsoft clearly didn't need to copy these Java libraries. The QWERTY keyboard analogy is also not a good one since there's a clear difference between something that is written and consists of tens of thousands of pieces vs. a relatively simple organization of characters that's also not written (it's physical). So that would probably go under a design patent. Another is about transformative use. There were cell phones using these Java libraries before Google decided to use them as well -- the Jasper S20 using the SavaJe OS for instance. Also the doom and gloom that the industry will break is absurdly doomsday. Simple libraries or SSO wouldn't constitute the level complexity and creativity of Oracle's Java libraries.
Google could have invested in creating its own libraries and only using the 57 or so classes that make up the Java language, made its own methods, classes, and packages. But that would have been a large effort to design them, get them battle tested, and to attract a developer community around it. It was easier to cheat to get ahead and ride the coattails of Oracle's community that were familiar with the Java libraries they had created. Google knew what they were doing was wrong at the time, but the cost to get to market meant it was worth it. Google didn't stop there, they continued to copy the changes that Oracle did to its libraries and copied new packages that Oracle created.
Finally, Google had the option to take the community license, but they didn't want to contribute back. I say, hard cheese Google, pay up.
I'm not sure why so many people here seem to be surprised by this, I got the exact same impression from the hearing. The problem for Google on the copyrightability front is that "compilations" of non-copyrightable items can be copyrightable even if the underlying items themselves are not, if the "selection, coordination, or arrangement" of those items involves sufficient creativity to be considered an "original work…
I think the CEO of Sun knew this.. "Google's lawyer, Robert van Nest, asked Schwartz whether, during his tenure at Sun, Java APIs were considered proprietary or protected by Sun." "'No,' Schwartz said in explaining the nature of open software. 'These are open APIs, and we wanted to bring in more people...we wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible.'" https://www.cnet.com/news/former-sun-…
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The Democratic Party would be considered center-right in any other country of the world, but the USA.
It depends on how you define things. For example, do you measure by where Democrats end up in practice, or where they want to go? For example, the United States is to the right of Germany in terms of universal healthcare. But Medicare 4 All, where many Democrats appear to want to go in the long term--though they disagree about how quickly they want to get there--would be quite to the left compared to the multi-payor…
Democrats generally agree that there should be universal access to health care, and a mostly agree that that should involve a public plan (not just a private subsidy) available to at least some section of the population beyond the current Medicaid population.
There is not general agreement within the Democratic Party on universal single-payer as even a long-term goal. The currently dominant neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party supports a public option as a long-term component of healthcare policy to acheive universal access, but does not generally support single-payer as a goal, in either the near or long term.
> In general, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code in the OECD
As your own source notes, net of transfers and taxes, the US has one of the least progressive systems in the OECD.
> In the area of taxes, the Democratic Party is center-right in some ways but quite left win in others. Merkel has championed Germany following along with Trump's corporate tax cuts.
You seem to be really obsessed with the CDU as your measure of center-right parties, but AFAICT the CDU is to the right of most parties labelled center-right, not just in Europe, but even in Germany specifically (which has a fairly wide range of center-right parties.)
But, yes, its really only the dominant faction of the Democratic Party that is center-right, the "progressive" faction is center to center-left by European terms, and the whole (today, with the gains the progressive wing has made over the recent years considered) is probably more center than center-right; the "Democrats are a center-right" party was most true at the height of the Clintonian neoliberalism of the Democratic Party which as faded over the last decade or so and particularly since Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign reenergized the progressive wing, though it has still not become dominant.
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No, I'm not imagining it as a website. An API is literally just a table of contents. meat.beef .. BeefAndPotatos .. BeefAndCabbage fish.cod .. CodWithPeas .. CodWithChips This is literally an exact representation of what an API looks like. You go to a recipe and you execute it expecting a result. And you get one, the implementation of it is up to the author of the book.
> An API is literally just a table of contents. An API is more like a set of mechanical gears that just happen to be shaped a little like words. If I change the names of things in a table of contents to synonyms, I can still use it to find what I am looking for. If I change the names of things my implementation of an API, it no longer functions as an interface for the things that worked with it previously. An API, de…
That is incorrect.
> . If I change the names of things in a table of contents to synonyms, I can still use it to find what I am looking for.
If I change the name to be something you cannot refer to, you cannot.
> If I change the names of things my implementation of an API, it no longer functions as an interface for the things that worked with it previously.
This is irrelevant to the API. The API does not make a guarantee about functionality. If I have an endpoint /foo and later /foo increments an internal counter by 1, the API remains unchanged. Documentation supplements and is not part of the API per se, which is an important distinction. The fact that Documentation and an API are being referred to in conjunction, was a failure that software will suffer for more than the lifetime of my children.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An API is literally just a table of contents. An API is more like a set of mechanical gears that just happen to be shaped a little like words. If I change the names of things in a table of contents to synonyms, I can still use it to find what I am looking for. If I change the names of things my implementation of an API, it no longer functions as an interface for the things that worked with it previously. An API, de…
> An API, despite looking like works, is not a literary expression of a process, it is a machine That is incorrect. > . If I change the names of things in a table of contents to synonyms, I can still use it to find what I am looking for. If I change the name to be something you cannot refer to, you cannot. > If I change the names of things my implementation of an API, it no longer functions as an interface for the th…
The only purpose of an API is providing mechanical access to functionality.
Could have avoided all of this and as a society we could have moved on an built better things. Only the lawyers won here.
Something for the current FAANG's to consider, buy the company that has goodwill but isn't doing well financially for various reasons.