If I copy a book's Table of Contents, but write the chapters myself, am I violating the original book's copyrights? Isn't it pretty much analogous to what's in contention here?
Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
371–380 of 771 posts
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#372Declaring APIs copyrightable is disgusting.
This court hasn't decided anything on the issue, so that's a bit premature unless its a response to the general concept of the Supreme Court deciding anything, in which case its a bit...tangential.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wine allows running windows applications without windows lincense, directly taking revenue from Microsoft who arguably invested a ton in making documentation and developer tools to make those applications. It seems you are arguing mainly because the user base is so much smaller it does not count. The law does not work that way. Windows SDK contains tens of thousands of lines in header files for those DLLs Wine implem…
"The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work."
It would be up to Microsoft to demonstrate that Wine impact the market for Windows license sales. I strongly doubt they can do that regardless how much they have spent on documentation and developer tools. Wine does not replace the need for an operative system, and if the usage ever become widespread enough to harm the market for windows then developers would just support programs natively for Linux, side stepping the need for wine.
Wine is not a market substitute for Microsoft windows, which is the first consideration that courts look at. Courts would then look if there is a potential existence of a licensing market (ie Microsoft licensing out the ABI) which again does not seems very likely. Failing those two tests it would be a rather uphill battle for Microsoft to demonstrate Wine impact on the market for Windows license sales.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#374Declaring APIs copyrightable is disgusting.
This court hasn't decided anything on the issue, so that's a bit premature unless its a response to the general concept of the Supreme Court deciding anything, in which case its a bit...tangential.
Yeah, I corrected the comment.
I also find it weird that "conservative" judges are expected to support APIs copyrightability. Is it because conservative is supposed to mean opposed to progress? Declaring APIs copyrightable is going to hurt the progress and technology.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#375Maybe 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…
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Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#376Lets Say that that Oracle wins. Does that mean that all 100+ companies who have copywrites on their software which all include "Helper.GetGUID" or "Calendar.NewMeeting" are going to sue each other to find out who the 1 true owner of the "Helper.GetGUID" API call is?
One of the ways copyright and patents differ is that patents can be infringed even if it's proven you had no prior knowledge of said patent, but copyright requires actual copying to infringe.
Independently arriving at the same API name is a defense from copyright violations. If both of us write the exact same method name, and we can both prove we didn't copy the other's, that's enough. We both have copyright over our own api call that we wrote.
Copyright probably shouldn't apply in any case that we could both independently create the same thing (in the same way the sentence "Hi, how are you" isn't copyrightable, but a chapter of shakespeare is -- the former is not a real expression of unique creativity).
So no, copyright does not determine the "1 true owner" of something that was not copied. That's patents.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ...
You absolutely do not have to protect a copyright. Even if a book is out of print, you can't start selling it--or even giving copies away for free. However, although IANAL, I assume that submitting something to a standards body and having it accepted allows those standards to be used in accordance with the terms of the standards body--which BTW may not require that use be free in all cases.
> Even if a book is out of print, you can't start selling it--or even giving copies away for free.
That's not exactly true. You can't photocopy it and start printing your own.
But if you have legal copies of it, you can definitely sell them or give them away.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#378Earlier 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,…
Couldn't edit my comment above to add: The interoperability argument is also disingenuous because Google didn't copy all of Oracle's Java libraries. It only copied the ones it deemed necessary to provide sufficient coverage for the needs of the Android platform and that developers of Oracle's Java community were familiar with. As the justices pointed out, it's a one-way interoperability.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#379I'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 a…
Isn't that exactly what the article is saying about the justices worrying it could "undermine copyright of computer programs"? What is the difference between an API (interface) and implementation? The algorithm. And algorithms are not copyrightable.
A lot can be interpreted into the law when it is beneficial for everybody to do so. But interpretation has its limits. Some laws must be made explicit by the legislature.
Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google
#380To 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…
They did. In legal parlance, that's a method-of-operation, and the relevant case law was Seldon(?). In which someone wrote a book on double entry accounting, then sued someone for infringement of their forms. The process of using a two column form couldn't be copyrighted, since that would essentially be a patent, and the Court determined a book teaching you how to do a thing implicitly grants license to do so without jeopardy of infringement. API's represent the documentation and actuators to make a machine do it's thing, therefore, both by test of "is it a control or thing allowing one to control another thing?" (Method-of-operation in common parlance) or "is it a communicative work teaching you to how to operate a specific process?" It passes muster.
I thought that was rather straightforward.
What wasn't straightforward to me was Oracle trying to argue that somehow, it makes sense that everyone should be forced to write their own language runtimes, and that somehow you can separate Java the language and virtual machine from the entity hierarchy, or that that is even a tenable state of affairs. Goldstein should have been slamming the "in Java" point hard.
Further, why was no one arguing that programming languages themselves are the front-end manifestations of interoperability by converting high level linguistics down to machine code?
This isn't hard.