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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

#361

Post by rcpt »

xxpor wrote: post #190
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…

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.

They had a chance to end California's housing disaster in Nordlinger vs. Hahn but ruled in the favor of landlords and speculators. Justice Stevens even admitted that the law is unlikely to change under standard democratic processes.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html

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

#362

Post by lolc »

belorn wrote: post #282
Analemma_ wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't bother with principled consistency, and so I wouldn't expect any from Microsoft if this goes Oracle's way. It's totally possible that Microsoft thinks APIs being non-copyrightable is good for them on net, but that if SCOTUS decides otherwise that they might as well go crush WINE anyway since they now have the means.

It will depend a lot on how wide a decision SCOTUS makes, and that fair use is interpreted in a very different way. Wine is not a windows replacement nor can Microsoft really show any negative impact on the market for windows license sales because of Wine. Wine (recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is "simply" a compatibility layer that convert between Windows ABI calls into native linux system calls. Win…

Yet, if you pick the right lines out of the WINE source-code, it will look eerily similar to the Windows source-code. And not by coincidence: if Windows' code had looked different, WINE code would have looked different too. And the important thing is that the Windows code could easily have looked different. It was a creative process that led to what it was. WINE is a derivative work.

Copyright law needs to be clarified to allow this without licence. Just like you're allowed to refer to a competitor's brand if you follow the rules in trademark law. It's one of those things where you think legislation should be rushing to fix it to remove uncertainty. Instead, a good chunk of senators is comfortable letting the Ellisons of this world make other people's life harder in negative-sum games.

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

#363

Post by laurent92 »

rayiner wrote: post #313
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of people can use VI at once without any direct impact on Bill Joy or his even even noticing it. Millions of people using his back yard at once would be an entirely different matter!

That means a good is non-rival. Why does that make it more or less “communal?” VI wouldn’t exist without Bill Joy, but his backyard would. Doesn’t that make VI more personal and less communal?

What is communal is the protection provided by the state. When the state has to protect houses, it’s an easy job, very deterministic, and costs are known. But states routinely refuse to protect large sums of money and require that you acquire your own protection. Something which is too costly for the commons or to vague to determine will be excluded from public protection. Protecting ideas is excluded for example, because they spread so fast that it is practically impossible to protect. I’m of the opinion that bytes are too costly/too vague to be protected by the state, and today is a good example since we had to use all courts up to the Supreme Court to rule on what sounds like a frivolous detail to most of the people. Ruling on whether an API is copyrightable is maybe a sign that the state attempts to protect too much and therefore can’t even distinguish between “too much” and “beyond” its scope.

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

#364

Post by curt15 »

moonchild wrote: post #309
zaphar wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this case goes the wrong way Oracle may find itself the subject of a lawsuit.

They surely know that. Java is a bigger money maker for them than cloud. (Large parts of amazon's cloud are implemented in java .)

Isn't OpenJDK the standard implementation of Java these days? Why would Amazon be using something different?

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

#365

Post by mumblemumble »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #318
mumblemumble wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't follow. If someone can determine the API by referring to code released under the Apache licence, what copyrights could they be infringing by building a different implementation of the API using the Apache-licensed code as a reference? For a copyright infringement to have taken place, there generally needs to be an unauthorised instance of recording or of duplication, of some copyrighted work. I put generally…

The same sort of API copyright that Oracle is trying to establish in this case.

How things actually shake out would depend a lot on the specifics of the Court's ruling, and I am not a lawyer either. But, if the court rules that Oracle owns a copyright to the Java APIs, and that this means they can prevent others from implementing their own versions of those APIs, and this right remains in effect even though they release a full implementation of them under GPLv2, then I can't see any particular reason to expect that things would work differently for Amazon's APIs and Apache2.

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

#366

Post by Spooky23 »

az226 wrote: post #353
cashewchoo wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason we have copyright protections to begin with is to reward and incentivize creation of new creative works with intellectual property protections. If you spent a large amount of resources in creating the library of Java code, why should only the implementation be protected? They've spent a lot of resources to come up with which methods to create, what to call them, how to describe them, how to organize them,…

It’s mind blowing to me that Google was too cheap to buy a license or buy Sun considering the strategic importance of the platform.

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

#367

Post by mumblemumble »

jeremyjh wrote: post #315
mumblemumble wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've given a license to use and extend the copy-written software, including its method signatures.

Oracle has done that, too. They release the full JDK under the GPL.

The law around these sorts of things can get pretty hair-splitty. My guess is that the situation here is that Amazon client libraries and OpenJDK are distributed with a license to create derivative works that are based on their respective products, but that these licenses do not necessarily grant a license to create a new thing that works the same out of whole cloth. Should Oracle win the case, that would seem to imply that the Court believes they do not. Alternatively, the fact that open source licenses do not appear to have even been brought up in the course of these hearings would perhaps imply that the existence of open source libraries that implement these APIs is legally irrelevant.

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

#368

Post by AnthonyMouse »

nodamage wrote: post #240

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…

> As applied to Java, individual method signatures like min and max might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and organize those individual methods into classes, and organize those classes into packages. That act of organization likely implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures are not.

The problem with this theory is that class and package declarations are still just recipes. There is a recipe for making chocolate chips. Then there is a recipe for making chocolate chip cookies where one of the ingredients is chocolate chips. It's recursive but it's not fundamentally different. Saying you can copyright a recipe for chocolate chip cookies because it's just organizing the recipes for chocolate chips and butter and brown sugar is pretty ridiculous.

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

#369

Post by Supermancho »

dragonwriter wrote: post #359
Supermancho wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This is irrelevant to the API. The API does not make a guarantee about functionality. The only purpose of an API is providing mechanical access to functionality.

That's what I said. However, that is not how the original case was presented and has affected the course. The API "describes something" has been convoluted with the API itself.
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