691–700 of 965 posts
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There's a line in here that says "In the 1990s, Oracle created a programming language called Java." that is funny on its face, but is written this way for the exact reason you're talking about.
To their credit, they are explicit (in a footnote I believe) about equating Sun and Oracle.
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>The fact that the Supreme Court decided not to overturn the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that APIs are copyrightable means that binding precedent on every court except the Supreme is that they are. Federal Circuit's ruling would only be precedent in the 9th circuit. As it does not have original jurisdiction in copyright disputes (only patent cases), it doesn't supercede any copyrightabili…
Federal Circuit's ruling would only be precedent in the 9th circuit. No, not only 9th circuit. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is binding nationwide. And if the case includes claims about patents and/or trademarks, even if those specific claims are thrown out, then the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit becomes the court that the case is appealed to. Which is how this particular case wound up there…
The Federal Circuit's copyright decision is binding on the parties to the case at hand, but the precedent for future cases is non-binding at best.
This was one of the arguments that the FSF and SFLC put forth in their amicus brief recommending that the Supreme Court not take up Google's appeal of the API copyright question:
> The court below predicted, on the basis of no compelling evidence, that the Ninth Circuit would depart from settled existing law in a novel direction which, as amici supporting the petition have said at length, would be destructive alike of commercial certainty and freedom to implement, thus inhibiting the progress of science and the useful arts. Neither the Ninth Circuit nor any other regional Court of Appeals is likely to defer to this improbable supposition, so the error is largely self-limiting. Such erroneous predictions of other courts’ holdings are not a suitable employment of this Court’s scarce resources in review by certiorari.
"The doctrine of “fair use” is flexible and takes account of changes in technology. Computer programs differ to some extent from many other copyrightable works because computer programs always serve a functional purpose. Because of these differences, fair use has an important role to play for computer programs by providing a context-based check that keeps the copyright monopoly afforded to computer programs within it…
The Court is apparently not familiar with much of my code :)
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Copyright is already misused to perform DCMA takedowns of fair use and is a well known option available to all comers. I think the classic example was the Prenda lawsuit firm. Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted…
I mean, that article is about how the Prenda saga ended with the lawyer disbarred and in prison. If his strategies had ended up a valid, legal option we would absolutely see trolls expanding into this. John Steele was testing the waters and got eaten by the deep acting as a warning for how not to go about this. There's some DMCA takedowns and such still, but they aren't quite lucrative enough to show up on patent tro…
Prenda is an example of how misuse of copyright is already in the trolls' toolbox.
Since you think about this stuff you might find the latest on the Santa Cruz Operation interesting:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/xinuos-finishes-pick...
Xinuos is the company that purchased the remnants of the SCO Group in 2011. The SCO Group, in turn, is a company most famous not for its actual products but for its litigation against IBM and Linux. That litigation began in 2003—partially funded by a very different Microsoft, only five years after the leak of the Halloween documents in which Microsoft acknowledged the "long-term viability" of open source software and discussed strategies to choke it out of the market.
From the dissent: > The Copyright Act expressly protects computer code. It recognizes that a “computer program” is protected by copyright... And it defines “‘computer program’” as “a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.” §101. That definition clearly covers declaring code—sets of statements that indirectly perform computer function…
> Thomas seems confused here. An API (declaring code) is not a computer program. A computer cannot execute declaring code - by definition - because it is missing the implementation. Yup, for all intents and purposes an API is just a data exchange contract between different software.
Specifically I'm less motivated to read more of the PDF when the opening says "The copied lines are part of a tool called an Application Programming Interface (API)." I don't think any programmer would ever describe an API as a tool. A program implementing an API, or talking to an API, sure, but the API itself, is not itself a tool or program.
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Designing an API is a creative work not unlike that of an architect, I see the merit in the dissent pointing out, e.g "there may have been only one way for Google to copy the lines of declaring code, but there were innumerable ways for Oracle to write them. Certainly, Apple and Microsoft managed to create their own declaring code."
I'm not sure what Thomas was referring to. What does "create their own declaring code" mean? Did they do some kind of white room implementation where they typed in the contents of a javadoc web site? Did they modify the name of parameters?
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> IP holder companies will become even more common: they will be used to hold copyright to one API and license it out to customers Not after this precedent, which says that APIs are free. What will happen: Intel licensing the i86 instruction set will not be possible from now on, same for ARM.
This ruling doesn't really change anything with respect to CPU instructions. The fair use defense doesn't cover patents. Patents are what are generally what is used by Intel, etc to protect (and license) new CPU instructions and provide protection for novel ideas/inventions for up to 20 years. Copyright generally protects specific expressions/implementations of an idea and last up to 95 years for corporate patents, o…
I fail to see why an ISA is fundamentally different than a standard library.
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Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Second, even if you have used a generator tool, regardless of if you wrote it or just run it, you're the creator of the works it produced, and you can trivially get copyright for it, unless somebody else copyrighted the same work. Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on…
> Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not. Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud. Proving that you're not the creator i…
Well, there is. If you get caught you get to jail.
Whereas if you get "caught" saying this generated melody is your melody, nothing happens. It's a totally valid thing to copyright. (And even if it wasn't, unlike the store theft case, there's no way for anybody to tell and prove it's not yours anyway).
But in any case, you appear confused as to this.
Whatever tool you can use to create a melody, the melody is still yours to copyright (unless somebody else came with it first and copyrighted it). You don't have to "think" of the melody or write it on the piano, or something.
In fact tons of melodies nowadays are written partially or wholly by compositional tools.
People using those tools have the regular claim to the output melodies, regardless of whether the tool is some DAW utility or "random melody" button (all of which exist), a music synthesis algorithm with some params and seed, or even an exhaustive, minimally creative tool to iterate over all possible melodies.
(Actually some musicians/coders did exactly the latter: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic... )
There's no rule "you can't copyright a generated melody".
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> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
Not a great analogy. People aren't looking to make "interoperable movies". But let's play that out for a moment. Would a copy of star wars with different actors, different scenic design, different music be much of a salable product? I don't think so. While I think it would be GREAT to see what Nick Nolte (Lucas was considering him) would have done with Han Solo over the wooden Harrison Ford, I'm not sure I care enoug…