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Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

fortune.com

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Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#41

Post by rayiner »

badlogic wrote: post #4

This advise by the Solicitor General hinges on an interpretation of section 102(b) of the copyright act. That section essentially says that "methods of operation" can't be copyrighted. The Solicitor General does not understand that APIs are a formalized description of "methods of operation" (page 14). I suggest reading the entire advisory, it's quite frustrating and contradicts itself.

There is nothing contradictory about it: as you say, the API is not the method of operation, it's one of many possible descriptions of the method of operation. I don't think anyone is confused by what an API is--its a simple concept.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#42

Post by WildUtah »

caf wrote: post #21

Is the logical extension of this that anyone who's written a standard C library was in violation of Kernighan & Ritchie's copyright?

"anyone who's written a standard C library was in violation of Kernighan & Ritchie's copyright"

K&R and Ken Thompson et al. were working for Bell Labs and assigned copyright to AT&T. AT&T cooperated with early open source programmers at Cal to produce UNIX software. The negotiations between Cal and AT&T produced a license from AT&T for UNIX and C as embodied in Berkeley UNIX. Berkeley BSD grants a license to anyone in the world to reproduce standard libraries and the rest of the UNIX system.

Thus anyone who writes a standard UNIX library has a solid license chain back to KR&T for the APIs regardless of the result of this lawsuit.

Now, the BIOS in your PC -- and the billion PC clones produced in the past 35 years -- becomes a criminal offense if the CAFC result is upheld. Quite a lot of other APIs that have been standardized under the laws as we understood them for the 50 years before CAFC reversed them soon become illegal forever.

But UNIX and its various flavors is fine.

Python, Perl, Ruby, C++, and C programmers should be fine as will be their standard libraries.

And we'll all adapt by not using proprietary APIs from now on. You'll have to be careful about code licenses and API licenses instead of just code licenses. It's a headache and a large one-time cost to the industry in libraries we'll lose forever but in the long run it'll be fine for programmers.

The real danger from the CAFC is the way they've been expanding patents. You can't escape from patents just by getting licenses or not copying others' work.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#43

Post by ChairmanZach »

Oletros wrote: post #32
ChairmanZach wrote: post #9

""[Google]'s Section 102(b) argument also suffers from a broader flaw." (this sentence transitions from the Administration's rejection of Google's suggestion that declaring code is inherently more functional and less expressive than implementing code to the DoJ's agreement with Oracle's lawyers on the purpose of Section 102(b))" That Google would be in the right by copying the declaring code of 27(!) different namesp…

So, reimplementing API's is crazy? Should Microsoft sue wine developers? Should Amazon sue anyone making a compatible EC2 API?

The .NET standard libraries are part of the CLI which is a part of ISO/IEC 23271:2012, a standard. I have no idea when it comes to the EC2 API.

Should it be legal for me to copy all of the declaring code of my employers product and after writing my own implementation selling it as my own product/work under a different name?

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#44

Post by ChairmanZach »

badlogic wrote: post #4

This advise by the Solicitor General hinges on an interpretation of section 102(b) of the copyright act. That section essentially says that "methods of operation" can't be copyrighted. The Solicitor General does not understand that APIs are a formalized description of "methods of operation" (page 14). I suggest reading the entire advisory, it's quite frustrating and contradicts itself.

Yet Google claims that the implementing code should be protected by copyright. How is "return a > b ? a : b;" not a method of operation if "public static int Max(int a, int b)" is...

If the implementation, CODE(!), is of course a formalized description of methods of operation, the declaring code (or API) is providing a means of access to it. Something that takes quite a bit of thought and creativity to do well.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#45

Post by richardfontana »

tzs wrote: post #34

(Reposting a question I asked in an earlier discussion, where I may have arrived too late for anyone to see it). That cases raises an interesting precedent issue that I have not been able to find the answer to. Let's assume that the Supreme Court decides not to take the appeal, so the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that APIs are copyrightable stands. What courts is this precedent for? Genera…

I believe the CAFC decision is not binding precedent for any court. If P sues D in the 9th circuit over copyright, even if there are patent claims as well (such that an appeal on a copyright issue would necessarily go to the CAFC), the CAFC decision in Oracle v. Google is not binding precedent. Of course that does not mean that the district court would be likely to ignore the CAFC decision in Oracle v. Google, but in principle it ought to be no more than persuasive, like any pertinent decision in a sibling circuit.

On the question in your last paragraph, where P sues D over copyright and patents in the 9th circuit, and there are only appeals of copyright issues, the appeal goes to the CAFC by statute.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#46

Post by rayiner »

iSnow wrote: post #13
colechristensen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but this is what is important. /s It's sarcastic, I get it, but it is also profoundly stupid. Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem as we continually move away from the importance of physical ob…

>Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem Uhm, no. Only for the HN crowd and maybe open source. There are a lot more and more pressing problems that have to do with things like the environment, food production, reproduction, migration and democracy vs. corporatism vs. ideology.

It's profoundly important to the U.S. as a whole. Creation of IP is the last thing that's going to be automated by robots. It's already been tremendously resistant to production being exported to China and India. We're already at the point where the primary product of the U.S. is IP in various forms (Apple designs the computers but they're manufactured in China).

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#48

Post by dmm »

ChairmanZach wrote: post #43
Oletros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, reimplementing API's is crazy? Should Microsoft sue wine developers? Should Amazon sue anyone making a compatible EC2 API?

The .NET standard libraries are part of the CLI which is a part of ISO/IEC 23271:2012, a standard. I have no idea when it comes to the EC2 API. Should it be legal for me to copy all of the declaring code of my employers product and after writing my own implementation selling it as my own product/work under a different name?

Wine reimplements win32 and directx, etc, ot the .Net api.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#49

Post by andrewmu »

ChairmanZach wrote: post #9

""[Google]'s Section 102(b) argument also suffers from a broader flaw." (this sentence transitions from the Administration's rejection of Google's suggestion that declaring code is inherently more functional and less expressive than implementing code to the DoJ's agreement with Oracle's lawyers on the purpose of Section 102(b))" That Google would be in the right by copying the declaring code of 27(!) different namesp…

From Florian Miller's bio on that page: "He is now developing a game app for smartphones and tablet computers." I wonder if that includes Android.

Re: Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

#50

Post by iwwr »

RexRollman wrote: post #30
markvdb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that one shouldn't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence. ("The Solicitor General does not understand...") BUT! At the White House level, incompetence equals malice. We have every right to expect competence from a level as high as the White House.

Well, these are the same people who think you can safely backdoor encryption.

I think they value power and control above safety.
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