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White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

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Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#121

Post by stinkytaco »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #117
laumars wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No more so than the games It goes without saying that copying games is illegal. Well, bar a few caveats which seldom apply to people who run emulators. > some emulators have reimplemented BIOSes I'm sure some do but many don't - hence my point.

> It goes without saying that copying games is illegal. Well, bar a few caveats which seldom apply to people who run emulators. Obtaining ROMs for games you own may or may not be, depending on your jurisdiction; in any case, it seems entirely ethical to have ROMs for games you own. Likewise for BIOSes.

I'm just going to play devil's advocate here, just for the sake of discussion, not because I believe it or not, but I think you could argue that obtaining ROMs for games you own is not ethical. The "phase shifting" argument is never one that held much water legally and certainly the industry would argue that if you want to use the content in a different form (i.e. an emulator), that you should pay for that additional right. It is a copy, after all. In the same way that the music industry would argue you can't upgrade all your vinyl records to mp3 without paying again. For example, should I be able to get Photoshop for all available platforms just because I happen to own one copy?

This, of course, brings us into the thorny world of whether copyright even makes sense in the software business. Copying seems to be an essential part of using a computer (copying runtimes into memory, caching web pages to your computer, etc.) so it may be an outmoded way of thinking about protecting IP.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#122

Post by shard972 »

themgt wrote: post #37
TallGuyShort wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the term "White House" often used to refer to anything within the executive branch? I have always assumed it meant the office of the President and perhaps his cabinet...

It's an amicus brief filed by DoJ with the Solicitor General's name of it - a man directly appointed by Obama in 2011. In more ways than even other DoJ briefs [1], there is a straight line from this to Obama, and surely if he wished to intervene to alter or prevent the submission of this brief he would have been able to. To answer your question yes, in general, actions taken with direct authority or direction from hi…

It makes sense really, anyone that the president appoints is not elected so can't be judged directly by the public through voting, the only fair thing to do is hold his publicly elected appointer responsible for actions.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#123

Post by JoshTriplett »

stinkytaco wrote: post #121
JoshTriplett wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It goes without saying that copying games is illegal. Well, bar a few caveats which seldom apply to people who run emulators. Obtaining ROMs for games you own may or may not be, depending on your jurisdiction; in any case, it seems entirely ethical to have ROMs for games you own. Likewise for BIOSes.

I'm just going to play devil's advocate here, just for the sake of discussion, not because I believe it or not, but I think you could argue that obtaining ROMs for games you own is not ethical. The "phase shifting" argument is never one that held much water legally and certainly the industry would argue that if you want to use the content in a different form (i.e. an emulator), that you should pay for that additional…

> In the same way that the music industry would argue you can't upgrade all your vinyl records to mp3 without paying again.

The music industry would love it if you had to pay for music multiple times, but you can nonetheless rip your own CDs. Or vinyl records with the right equipment.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#125

Post by ahallock »

Joky wrote: post #21

I've always wondered if there is not a general conspiracy of lawyers to protect their "industry". They have all interests to keep the current patent system, as well as extending copyright protection to anything: it keeps the demand for lawyers high. Of course you have the same view of software and/or system engineer, who build broken systems just to justify billing more maintenance :)

No more a conspiracy than lions hunting a gazelle. It's just in their nature.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#126

Post by notdanariely »

fapjacks wrote: post #110
wmeredith wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty nightmarish scenario, and I sympathize with your friend. However, it does nothing to convince me that most laws are used for evil.

I firmly believe that laws provide psychological boundaries for most people (in that I believe most people are neutral good, lawful good or neutral evil), and provide tools for some to abuse others (the lawful evil). Given a perfect distribution, or even a bell curve, I think yes, most uses of law are not used for evil purposes. But there is a significant segment of the spectrum that does. Of course, in my purely ane…

Dan Ariely's recent book titled "Dishonesty" presents a lot of research that supports this. His thesis (in part) is that people tend to cheat / lie right up until the point they can no longer internally think of themselves as decent people.

In this interpretation, the legal system is a reasonably objective proxy to inform people how far they are across the line. This suggests that even unenforced laws can help establish an acceptable norm, so people have an external comparison.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#127

Post by 0x0 »

josho wrote: post #100
briantmaurer wrote: post #43

Programming is in this odd position somewhere between the structure of math and the creativity of writing. Some things feel as obvious as basic addition, which clearly should not be copyrightable, while other things feel as clever as complex poems, which clearly should be copyrightable. I am not a copyright expert, but in my opinion APIs usually fall closer to the structured math half of programming. ex. GET, POST, P…

When I lived in Java based environments I would have agreed with you. But, having moved on and seen C#, Ruby/Rails, Objective-C, etc. Seeing how differently APIs have been implemented I have an appreciation for the creativity possible in API design. But, there seems to be a balance, is the API of a single class copyrightable? No, probably not. Is the API of a large system like Java's copyrightable, I really do think…

The entire reason the PC business exploded was because the IBM BIOS (an API if I ever saw one!) was reverse engineered, documented, and then clean room reimplemented by Compaq

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#128

Post by stinkytaco »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #123
stinkytaco wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just going to play devil's advocate here, just for the sake of discussion, not because I believe it or not, but I think you could argue that obtaining ROMs for games you own is not ethical. The "phase shifting" argument is never one that held much water legally and certainly the industry would argue that if you want to use the content in a different form (i.e. an emulator), that you should pay for that additional…

> In the same way that the music industry would argue you can't upgrade all your vinyl records to mp3 without paying again. The music industry would love it if you had to pay for music multiple times, but you can nonetheless rip your own CDs. Or vinyl records with the right equipment.

>The music industry would love it if you had to pay for music multiple times, but you can nonetheless rip your own CDs. Or vinyl records with the right equipment.

You can, but it's not legal, at least not in the United States. It's never really been litigated, but a reading of law would seem to say it's not legal. There's no "personal use" or "personal backup" clause in the law. It's a copy, and copying is not OK outside of the "fair use" bounderies outlined in section 117 (there's also some provisions for libraries and archives, but those don't apply to individuals).

Legality is really tangential to the point, however. The question is that for any given work, whether that's a book, piece of music, game, etc, do you "own" that work seperate from the physical media you purchased it on. Can you obtain a ROM, a copy of the book or a copy of the record in question legally in perpetuity because you bought it in one form once?

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#129

Post by AnthonyMouse »

rayiner wrote: post #63
sambeau wrote: post #19

"declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection." Would this apply to REST APIs too? Someone needs to explain to them that that would be like being able to copyright how files are organised in a drawer, how books are organised on shelves in a Library, how a book is indexed, how departments in a company are named, how streets are numbered, how camp…

There is a museum in Philadelphia (the Barnes Foundation), which houses a collection meticulously arranged by Albert Barnes over the course of his life. I think that arrangement is itself a work of art entitled to copyright protection.

What is that copyright protection supposed to look like?

There are clearly things that combine function and expression. Essentially all computer programs do this. But if the expressive part can be copyrighted and the functional part can't then the combined thing has to be separated into what can be copyrighted and what cannot.

The thing about APIs is that by their nature they're purely functional. There is no expressive component that can be extracted and changed without changing the function itself. Even the name is functional because that string of characters is what the compiler uses to match invocations of the function with its definition.

Try a mirror image analogy. First, a popular lock manufacturer encodes the mechanical specification for its lock cylinder as music, and it turns out to have a pleasing sound. When the sound hits the top 40 they can have all the music royalties, but that doesn't mean they can copyright the lock itself as an expression of the music.

Second, a popular lock manufacturer starts selling locks which will only open if the key blanks are encoded with a particular sequence of musical notes composed by a human artist, and asserts that such key blanks are copyrighted. It doesn't matter how expressive the music is when you play it on a piano, or whether it would be copyrightable if it was reproduced as sheet music rather than key blanks. If you specify it as an interface then it can't be copyrighted in that context because the functional interface demands that specific expression.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#130

Post by arfar »

Joky wrote: post #21

I've always wondered if there is not a general conspiracy of lawyers to protect their "industry". They have all interests to keep the current patent system, as well as extending copyright protection to anything: it keeps the demand for lawyers high. Of course you have the same view of software and/or system engineer, who build broken systems just to justify billing more maintenance :)

Personally, I find it hard to blame lawyers on the whole for this.

A lawyers job is to represent their client as best as they possibly can (within the rules of the law). The best outcome for Oracle here is copyright is valid for APIs, it's then the lawyers job to try to get that outcome. It is illegal (i.e. disbarred) for a lawyer (in New Zealand at least) to refuse instruction without a good enough reason.

It should be judges/the law which stops these silly verdicts from occurring.

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