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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

#131

Post by Natsu »

schoen wrote: post #119
Natsu wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight correction regarding the part saying that 'anyone' may file one: "An amicus curiae brief may be filed only by an attorney admitted to practice before this Court as provided in Rule 5." https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/supct/rule_37

Sorry, that's quite right. I should have said "through an attorney" to avoid the possible interpretation that you could personally write and file a brief. That rule is stricter than other Supreme Court rules related to filings by parties. If you're a natural person and not a corporation, you can file pro se pleadings before the Supreme Court in your own cases. Just not in other people's cases.

Yes, that's how I interpreted it, but I thought I should point it out to avoid confusion. I also thought I remembered this being a fairly recent rules change, so there's that too.

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

#132

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wmeredith wrote: post #25
codecamper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how often are laws used positively?

This is an overly cynical view. The vast majority of laws are used positively. The are the foundation of this country. When they are abused it makes headlines (sometimes). When everyone gets to work and back safely and can afford to pay the mortgage and buy a big screen, it's just business as usual.

> The vast majority of laws are used positively.

I find that a sensible way to look at it is that laws that are used are bad laws. Because almost everyone follows sensible laws so they only need to be litigated in rare outlier cases. By contrast, bad laws end up in the courts continuously because they're susceptible to abuse by dishonest parties.

So the vast majority of laws are used negatively, because good laws don't have to be used.

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

#133

Post by PebblesHD »

ambrice wrote: post #115
rayiner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?

So, wine (the windows emulator) should be illegal?

  > wine (the windows emulator)
Intentional humor?

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

#134

Post by throwawaykf05 »

btilly wrote: post #65

Entirely predictable. Obama's VP was one of the strongest supporters of all things copyright in Congress during his legislative career. Obama's administration has clearly been on the side of Hollywood etc as well. Given that fact, on any issue you can depend on this administration to come down on the side of the strongest and most expansive possible interpretation of what should be covered by copyright. In this confl…

* In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. *

This is incorrect. By most reasonable readings of copyright law, API's have always been covered by copyright, unless deny that API design holds any modicum of creative expression. So it's more Google that's trying to reduce the scope of what's protected rather than Oracle trying to expand it.

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

#136

Post by dadair »

Zikes wrote: post #48
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…

Well... POST /cart http://www.google.com/patents/US5715314

I don't understand patents like this...

Could a store owner in a mall patent the way that users walk into the store, buy a t-shirt, and leave?

Anyone able to explain to me how the linked patent was deserved? I'm genuinely curious.

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

#138

Post by rayiner »

ambrice wrote: post #115
rayiner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?

So, wine (the windows emulator) should be illegal?

In the context of the parent comment: if you build a business cloning Microsoft's Win32 API, I don't think you can complain if you get sued in the same way you can for a patent troll.

And yes, I think Microsoft should get to decide whether it wants clones of Win32, and also that it's a waste of time for open source developers to implement non-open source APIs.

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

#139

Post by saryant »

bbatsell wrote: post #111
saryant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that has happened. An amicus brief has been filed, that is all. An amicus brief is not law and the Supreme Court has not yet ruled one way or another.

The current holding comes from the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and is in Oracle's favor. Unlike other regional Courts of Appeal, the Fed Circuit's decisions are binding nationwide because the court has subject-matter jurisdiction rather than geographic jurisdiction. The Solicitor General's amicus is in full support of the Fed Circuit's decision, and the Supreme Court has historically taken an SG amicus hugely in…

Thanks, I wasn't aware of all that.

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

#140

Post by JoshTriplett »

stinkytaco wrote: post #128
JoshTriplett wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 out…

Recording a film from TV is copying as well, but that was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was legal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive.... , AKA "Sony v. Betamax".

That seems like a fairly clear precedent.

Also see Sony v. Connectix for a somewhat related case regarding emulation and BIOSes. In that case, Connectix obtained copies of Sony's BIOS as part of reverse-engineering it (though they didn't distribute BIOS images with their emulator), and that was ruled legal.

That seems like an even clearer precedent, specifically discussing emulation, as well as copying, for commercial purposes even.

Now, it is fairly clear that sites hosting ROMs for download are violating copyright law. Then again, so is the Internet Archive, and I'd bet the majority of people on HN agree with what archive.org does.

> 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?

Personal opinion, not based on any particular country's copyright law or precedent (though there is some precedent): personal copying without redistribution should always be OK. It's distribution that copyright should cover.

(That's separate from my opinions on how copyright law ought to be changed.)

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