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Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

groklaw.net

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Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#11

Post by j_baker »

nknight wrote: post #3
revelation wrote: post #2

There have been enough comments on what this means, whats going to happen next, etc. Something that is bothering me. Juries are meant to infuse some common reasoning into the law. And still, you get decisions like this: The rangeCheck method in TimSort.java and ComparableTimSort.Java YES, infringing....

They're meant to maintain control by the people over the judiciary, it has nothing to do with "common sense". In this case particularly, the problem is lack of un common sense. You cannot expect non-engineers to understand that rangeCheck is utterly uncreative, because they don't understand rangeCheck to begin with, nor its underpinnings. They can't even apply a generic sense of right or wrong to it. This sort of tri…

Nor can they be expected to understand accounting principles in accounting fraud cases. Nor can they be expected to understand tax law in tax cases. Heck, you really can't rely on them to understand theft laws in cases of theft. In fact, I'd reckon that we rely on jurors to understand very little.

That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a jury who doesn't get it.

I think there are arguments to be made in support of changing how we use juries in the courts, but this isn't one of them. I mean, this argument applies to just about every case that uses a jury, and it's simply not feasible to expect that jurors be knowledgeable in all the areas that a given case touches upon.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#12

Post by krakensden »

dminor wrote: post #8
gouranga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

They were both written by Joshua Bloch, while working at Google. The first was for TimSort, which he donated to Sun/OpenJDK. He then reused the rangeCheck code in Android.

This sort of thing is a little scary. We can't know for certain whether he wrote the same code the same way twice, or if he copied and pasted it, but I can certainly imagine doing the former.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#13

Post by j_baker »

rfugger wrote: post #5
revelation wrote: post #2

There have been enough comments on what this means, whats going to happen next, etc. Something that is bothering me. Juries are meant to infuse some common reasoning into the law. And still, you get decisions like this: The rangeCheck method in TimSort.java and ComparableTimSort.Java YES, infringing....

David Boies reportedly asked, with the jury out of the room, for "infringer's profits" from the nine lines. Judge Alsup said it was "bordering on the ridiculous."

I'm a bit curious what profits Oracle expects to take. Google isn't profiting off of Android (that I know of) except in the sense that it makes for more people who are willing to use their search engines. That's pretty difficult to quantify. How do you determine whether a search from Android wouldn't have been made from some other platform (say an iPhone) had Android not existed?

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#14

Post by duaneb »

krakensden wrote: post #12
dminor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were both written by Joshua Bloch, while working at Google. The first was for TimSort, which he donated to Sun/OpenJDK. He then reused the rangeCheck code in Android.

This sort of thing is a little scary. We can't know for certain whether he wrote the same code the same way twice, or if he copied and pasted it, but I can certainly imagine doing the former.

He copied and pasted:

Q. The rangecheck function: Did you copy the Sun code while working on Android?

A. I did that while working on Timsort, and it was during the period I was employed at Google, but not for Google. It was something I wrote on my own for OpenJDK.

[I had not heard of Timsort before; it's (apparently) a very efficient sort written by Tim Peters for Python (see Wikipedia), and ported by Bloch to Java.]

[Timsort will come up again later. I'm somewhat appalled by how much fuss is being made over the trivial "rangecheck" function.]

Q. Why did you copy the rangecheck function for Timsort?

A. It's good engineering to reuse the same function if possible [The context here was that he expected to fold Timsort into a public version of Java, and at that point it would make sense to call the existing rangecheck function from the new code rather than writing a different one.]

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#15

Post by nknight »

j_baker wrote: post #11
nknight wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're meant to maintain control by the people over the judiciary, it has nothing to do with "common sense". In this case particularly, the problem is lack of un common sense. You cannot expect non-engineers to understand that rangeCheck is utterly uncreative, because they don't understand rangeCheck to begin with, nor its underpinnings. They can't even apply a generic sense of right or wrong to it. This sort of tri…

Nor can they be expected to understand accounting principles in accounting fraud cases. Nor can they be expected to understand tax law in tax cases. Heck, you really can't rely on them to understand theft laws in cases of theft. In fact, I'd reckon that we rely on jurors to understand very little. That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a…

Accounting principles, tax law, and theft laws are far easier for the layman to understand than programming. They deal with accounting and taxes in their everyday lives, and they understand it's wrong to steal. The principles are taught to every child in our society and they put them to practical use throughout their lives.

None of this applies to programming, which bears only the most tenuous of relationships to anything most people will learn or use in their lives.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#16

Post by dchest »

carbocation wrote: post #10
dchest wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Josh Bloch testified that he copied this function. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120419221941...

Indeed; he copied it from himself.

This would be the case if copyright wasn't transferable. AFAIK, he wrote it while working for Google, thus the owner of his code was Google, which then transferred/donated the ownership to Sun. He testified that he copied the code which he didn't own anymore.

This is all pretty fucked up, but that's what the law is.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#17

Post by bad_user »

nknight wrote: post #15
j_baker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor can they be expected to understand accounting principles in accounting fraud cases. Nor can they be expected to understand tax law in tax cases. Heck, you really can't rely on them to understand theft laws in cases of theft. In fact, I'd reckon that we rely on jurors to understand very little. That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a…

Accounting principles, tax law, and theft laws are far easier for the layman to understand than programming. They deal with accounting and taxes in their everyday lives, and they understand it's wrong to steal. The principles are taught to every child in our society and they put them to practical use throughout their lives. None of this applies to programming, which bears only the most tenuous of relationships to any…

Most people are exposed to math and to cookbook recipes for cooking food, both areas having strong relationships with programming.

What is harder to grasp is that programming is an intersection of math with cooking. And cookbook recipes are copyrightable, while math is not.

And so the burden lies on the lawyer to describe the relationship between an algorithm and the math behind it. That isn't necessarily hard, but requires creativity and time, plus you have to take into account the short attention span of most people, so you've got to pick your battles. And I guess Google's lawyer did a bad job here.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#19

Post by ars »

gouranga wrote: post #6
thereallurch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From OpenJDK: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); } From Google: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgume…

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement.

The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

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