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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

#721

Post by solarkraft »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #693
toast0 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Supreme Court ruling is a lot better than settlement if they've decided they want to pivot to sueing independent implementations of their APIs. I wouldn't find it compelling to follow if Google took the other side of a settlement they were involved in to go and pursue others. Maybe they settled because they figured out they could make more money that way, regardless of the question of law.

Interesting! Leaves me wondering, what independent implementations of Google APIs are out there?

One of the more important in my opinion is the microG project (https://microg.org/), a free re-implementation of Google’s proprietary libraries for Android that many apps on the Play store depend on.

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

#722

Post by pjmlp »

thu2111 wrote: post #666
Spooky23 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Could Google have made Android using J2ME?

They could have yes, with Java SE actually

> The SavaJe OS was a monolithic OS-and-Java platform, an implementation of Sun Microsystems' Java Standard Edition, as opposed to the more limited Micro Edition usually offered on mobile phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SavaJe

Also the Nokia and Sony-Ericson extensions to J2ME were quite good, while keeping compatibility with J2ME related specifications.

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

#723

Post by thecompilr »

For me a good analogy to API is driving a car. The interface (API) to the car is the steering wheel, the pedals, and some common controls like signals and the horn.

You only need to learn to drive one car, and you can drive them all. But under the hood the cars are completely different. Gas, diesel, battery, hybrid, all have the same API, yet no one says that you copied a car if it has a steering wheel.

One could probably reinvent the (steering) wheel and possibly make a better interface to the car, but that would result in people having to learn how to drive your car specifically.

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

#724

Post by mumblemumble »

imtringued wrote: post #695
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Whole" in the sense of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" is not generally understood to imply the maximal possible scope in any given context. It's simply meant to meant to talk about how the identify an aggregation (of no particular scale) relates to the identities of its individual components. Which is how I'm using it. An API that consists of two functions and one that consists of a billion function…

An API is an invisible thing. It's not in the code. It has absolutely nothing to do with code. You can create an API without any code at all. Therefore copyright does nothing because there are ways of copying an API that do not violate copyright. Compare it to x86. It's just an "API" as well. Someone can write a specification or reference listing all opcodes and even though that reference is licensed under MIT or GPL…

> you are still not allowed to make your own x86 processor

AMD, Cyrix, Transmeta

I'm 99% certain that, if Intel had legal grounds to keep them out of the market, they would have done so. I'm 100% uncertain what's different between that case and this one.

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

#726

Post by redwall_hp »

cwkoss wrote: post #480
biztos wrote: 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…

The greatest way to support art is UBI. Why should creativity be subject to the arbitrary whims of the lowest common denominator? For every Harry Potter there are hundreds of authors who can't even make enough to write full time. And some of what we consider to be quality literature would never be commercially successful in a modern context.

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

#727

Post by redwall_hp »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #368
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 a…

Microsoft should get in on this, then. Because the Java and C# Math classes are virtually identical, aside from method case.

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

#728

Post by kovacs_x »

It's strange that there's little of comparison of an API to a standard. (Think like ISO standards) as API is not a program itself, it's a rule-set how two programms can interoperate.

Patenting API's imo is like patenting a rule set for a game (say like football). Imagine someone patenting rules for a football and afterwards it's allowed only to play the game if you are "licensed" by the patent holder.

anyways- the Googles defense team seems bland. Not sure whether they really understand the idea of what API is and what's it's purpose and that API's textual representation is absolutely non-essential.

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

#729

Post by gameswithgo »

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…

When you can wrangle the analogies in reasonable ways in either direction, why not wrangle them in ways that make the tech industry sane, rather than insane?

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

#730

Post by thu2111 »

pjmlp wrote: post #722
thu2111 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Could Google have made Android using J2ME? They could have yes, with Java SE actually > The SavaJe OS was a monolithic OS-and-Java platform, an implementation of Sun Microsystems' Java Standard Edition, as opposed to the more limited Micro Edition usually offered on mobile phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SavaJe Also the Nokia and Sony-Ericson extensions to J2ME were quite good, while keeping compatibility wit…

The standard GUI toolkit for Java SE at the time was Swing. That would never have been appropriate for mobile, but they'd have had to support it anyway. Also the Android team believed that HotSpot wouldn't work on heavily RAM constrained phones, hence Dalvik. Were they wrong? Doubt it.
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