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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

#731

Post by thu2111 »

cookiengineer wrote: post #669
thu2111 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No they wouldn't. MS would only be able to sue people who reimplemented the NT kernel API for their own projects, which is basically just Wine and ReactOS, but those projects have no money.

This case is not about using APIs to build apps. Standard software licenses clearly allow that. The case is about reimplementing them.

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

#732

Post by thu2111 »

imtringued wrote: post #714
thu2111 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>From a plain reading of copyright law it's obvious APIs far smaller and simpler than Java should fall under copyright. You do realize that copyrighting APIs is functionally useless? There are ways of copying APIs that do not violate copyright. Reinvention is still possible precisely because of things like javadoc or the fact that Oracle doesn't have copyright ownership of code that uses the Java API. There is an end…

There are ways of copying APIs that do not violate copyright

Are there? That's exactly what's being litigated.

Two inventors build the exact same thing

Patents don't cover APIs, by the nature of their form as a patent typically must make a narrow list of claims. To patent the Java API would presumably require making the entire specification a set of claims, which the PTO wouldn't accept.

You could argue APIs should be patentable but not copyrightable. That'd be weird though. Copyright is clearly the better fit, if you want APIs to be protected works.

Clean room designs are the status quo in the hardware world. There is zero fragility. It's done all the time.

No. The hardware world is the exact opposite of what you claim. ARM sells ISA licenses exactly because in the hardware world the Oracle side won out a long time ago: if you want to implement the ARM instruction set you need to pay ARM for the privilege. And if you want to use ARM's implementation you need to pay them even more. AMD can only make Intel-compatible chips because they have an architecture license for complex historical reasons, and so on.

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

#733

Post by ColanR »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #578
ColanR wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you willing to learn all those 20 different language/runtime/tool chains? No, and that's exactly my point. Because it would be impossible to support everything, developers and corporations might have to aim for more limited reach. I imagine that would lead to a situation where we have 20 different widely supported kernels, 20 different up-to-date web browsers, 20 different modern OSes, etc. I would love to be a…

I don’t see this resulting in 20 different web browsers or kernels or OSes that are anywhere near as good as the ones we have today. Making even just one is a shocking investment of resources and a massive ongoing maintenance responsibility. Many, many human lifetimes have gone into building something like Chrome. Wishing that this herculean effort was forced to be duplicated 19 times over just so that you could have…

Talking about the complexity of modern software might be a tangent. However.

I think that if time and effort were limited by this fragmentation, we would find that we're able to do just fine with browsers that have fewer hours of effort put into them. The current range of second-tier browsers have a ton of strange and interesting ideas about them, but because the web standards they have to support are so complex they simply can't support much of the modern web. I imagine that those standards would be written much more conservatively if the writers knew that it would be impractical for anyone to implement them.

> Wishing that this herculean effort was forced to be duplicated 19 times over just so that you could have alternatives to choose feels kinda perverse.

There is absolutely no reason for you to get personal.

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

#734

Post by umvi »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #608
mamon wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, after initial fallout it is a long-term win for software industry, right? ;)

Yea, though the fallout will be pretty bad when IBM comes trolling around with their shiny new copyright on SQL. Copyright lasts 70 years from the death of the author, so IBM would be handed an active infringement claim on basically every company that has ever sold a database product.

I hope Oracle gets hit extra hard in that case

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

#735

Post by HotHotLava »

I'm wondering: Assuming Oracle wins on copyrightability, how will it affect BSD-licensed software? The license text just says

> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: [...]

But reimplementing the API is neither using the source code nor distributing it, so would it be covered or not?

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

#736

Post by pjmlp »

thu2111 wrote: post #730
pjmlp wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

HotSpot wasn't the only game in town for embedded, and Dalvik was much worse than what Nokia and Sony-Ericson had on their own (not HotSpot based) implementations.

So much that they eventually rebooted the whole thing with ART.

Apparently Swing was appropriate for SavaJE, go figure.

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

#738

Post by kovacs_x »

kovacs_x wrote: post #728

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 Go…

Imo, making API's copyrightable will only make things worse for all the US based software companies, sort of gain dollar, loose hundred situation, as it'll open a whole new front in an already existing software patent wars.

Maybe it's just what Google wants- to test the water and this is more of a opening act and the real play is only ahead of us! ;)

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

#740

Post by kovacs_x »

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…

Maybe instead of comparing to cookbooks we should compare an API's to technical standards? (think ISO)
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