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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

#661
post #480
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> copyright should not exist at all Copyright is not just about software. Imagine a world in which you write a novel, let's call it Harry Potter, and publish it. And then I see people liking it, so I publish it too, but I can sell it cheaper because I don't have to recoup the costs of having written it. Or imagine you write and record a song, let's call it Revolution. A shoe company can use that exact recording in an…

Destroying copyright would make some business models go extinct. However, society should use IP laws to maximize the societal goods of creation, not to keep the entrenched players' businesses profitable. There are hundreds of ways to monetize creative works. It's laughable to think that creativity will cease if we don't allow 70 year rent-seeking on the products of that effort. I think 90%+ percent of "societally use…

I think what you'd see instead is a widespread destruction of some kinds of creative industries, combined with a retreat to technology platforms that enforce copyright with technological rather than legal means. See: the video games industry and the domination of consoles, the iOS App Store.

Video games are protected by copyright but it doesn't have much teeth, modulo occasional arrests of crack authors. What happened was not that people gave up on charging for video games, but rather it created a market for sufficiently secure platforms that piracy was very hard.

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

#662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rele…

The difference is that the way Google used the APIs is not compatible with code use under the GPLv2 (in particular, they didn’t GPLv2 license it). If the original code implementing the APIs is Apache licensed however, you have a very free hand in changing the original code so you probably wouldn’t care about your working being considered a derivative of it. I’m not sure that absolves you categorically but it definitely sounds like a better position to be in.

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

#663

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…

Interesting point. If I implement, say, the List interface for a class in my program, have I violated the API copyright?

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

#664

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>> the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable. > But what is discussed here is not the cookbook but just the table of contents. You probably can't copy that either. That's like Oracle's example of making a new Harry Potter book with all the same chapter titles. I don't know if there are any good examples of APIs one can make based on books..

I mean you very much can copy Chapter 1: Introducing the main character .. Chapter 6: Introducing side character Chapter 7: Arrival at the main story place .. Chapter 17: The final chapter In fact there are whole classifications of literature that identify basic storylines, tropes, structure etc. . The reason you couldn't copy the harry potter chapter titles exactly is because they contain specific titles, e.g. "the…

> Also, the argument is about reuse/interoperability. Recipes are something you use and the naming is functional and it is important that it is similar enough. I am not aware of harry potter chapters being used like that, but if authors start talking about "The sorting hat" chapter as a term of the art , then yes you should be able to use that term. Similarly to how you can introduce a weapon in your novel without paying royalties to Chekhov.

I agree very much. I just don't think books are very useful for expressing those ideas. Interoperability is rarely an important consideration when writing a book.

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

#666
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IIRC it wasn't purely about money.

Sun had a mobile platform at the time, J2ME. If you wanted to use Java on mobile, it had to be J2ME. There was no option back then to just pay money and pick'n'choose which bits of Java you wanted. In fact there still isn't, the Java guys are zealous about compatibility.

And J2ME was in turn a slow, multi-vendor, standards oriented kind of thing with multiple implementations. It was (a) very limited, (b) very buggy, (c) very poor developer UX. The issue wasn't Java itself but rather the huge variety of bugs and missing APIs between different phones. See the issues Android faced with fragmentation and multiply it by a million. In fact it was an attempt to fight fragmentation that led Sun to take the hard-line "our way or the high way" approach!

Additionally, J2ME was not open source but Google or rather Andy Rubin felt strongly that Android had to be open source under non-GPL licenses because mobile vendors hated the GPL. They could just about tolerate Linux but that was the limit. So Google was going to go to Sun and say, hey, please release one of your own profitable Java products under an open source license, so we can make more money out of Google Maps? No way.

Could Google have made Android using J2ME? Maybe. Perhaps? But it'd have been a huge ball and chain around their ankles and Android would have been radically different, likely different enough to have killed it. For instance J2ME had a simple GUI library but it was limited by the need to run on feature phones. They'd have never been able to make it as advanced as the Android GUI toolkit was, and competing with the iPhone? Forget it.

To some extent this situation was inevitable. From a technical perspective using the Java platform worked out very well for Android. But given Sun's business model at the time and the history of J2ME there was no way to take it to the next level. In hindsight we can say that Google could have replaced the entire revenue stream of J2ME, but what company wants to replace a many-vendor many-customer ecosystem with a single revenue source? Nobody would do that!

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

#667
post #399
post #228

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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.

If they wanted to lose, wouldn't it have been much easier (and possibly cheaper) to settle? I can't imagine Oracle would have a problem with getting to say they were right, and getting a boatload of cash, without all the bother of the Supreme Court. And doesn't intentional bad representation have weird and costly externalities, like reputation damage for the lawyer? I love the image of Google and Oracle behaving like…

Google would permanently lose the tech world if they don't appear to fight this battle. Give away the whole concept of API's free of copyright? The reputational damage would be immense and probably spell the beginning of the end for Google.

I had the same thought (that Google is intentionally throwing the case) when I read over the Google lawyer's approach, there's no way the guy is that out of touch.

The Google of today is not the Google that started this case all those years ago and the Google of today is working alot harder to create its own walled gardens. They have alot more to gain from suing the pants off anyone who tries to interoperate with them, than they stand to lose from a few $billion payoff to Oracle.

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

#668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. I wonder about the differences (which definitely do exist) between Oracle's Java API and the OpenJDK Java API. While they really have to be substantially similar to allow interoperability, OpenJDK is open source (GPL) and Oracle'…

They already switched to OpenJDK a while ago. I think this case covers historical damages back from before they did that.

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

#669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone could also argue your analogy with a cookbook is wrong, because if we talk about headers and APIs, it's more like Oracle claiming that their stove's interface to the pot is copyrightable. How is heat transferred to the pot? From the stove to the pot, this is the API, and how it's implemented doesn't matter. Oracle claims that this specific thing, that you turn on any button and make it heat up is copyrightabl…

Tortured analogies like this is why the whole software industry is going to be making a surprised pikachu face when Oracle wins (see my comment a day or two ago on the prior story for substantially similar sentiment). Heat transfer to a pot is not an API, not even remotely close. It's a physical fact that has been observed since the stone age. The Java API is huge. It's not a mere physical fact, nor even a collection…

Well, if Oracle wins this court battle, the effect will be disastrous because Microsoft is then legally able to sue everybody that uses their NT kernel API, including Oracle.

The whole software industry would have to change, and the potential pitfalls of buying software without an open source license would be too great a risk for pretty much everyone that developed any software for any proprietary environment.

I mean, using a proprietary GPU could be enough to get sued because you are rendering things on the screen, right?

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

#670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would probably be considered fair use. Because APIs have never before been considered copyrightable, unless Google wins on fair use in this case, we will have exactly zero on-point case law as to when an API reimplementation is fair use. Speculating on what would be considered fair use in API re-implementations in that case would be extremely speculative. > The amount of money Oracle would get back (and going…

Google already switched Android over to OpenJDK in 2016, which they have an absolutely ironclad right to use without paying for. If Oracle does end up winning the payout will be for the period of 2008-2016 when Google was using their own home brewed Java implementation.

Unless this ruling becomes applicable to the Java bytecode format, in which case they can go after Dalvik and ART (the latter of which is still in use).
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