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Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

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Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#151
post #142
post #104

If you found Sarah's coverage of the trial useful, she is accepting payments on PayPal since she was doing it with her own money: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/731687243916529665

It costs her money to post on Twitter?

It costs her money not work while at court.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#153
post #152
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs her money not work while at court.

Are you sure? Maybe her employers allowed it.

She's a freelancer, as are a lot of journalists. She said so herself: takes time away from paid projects.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Oracle can appeal to the Federal Circuit.

Of course they can. But appeals typically have little chance of success, and a case that has already gone all up the appeal chain once and had a complete retrial? No way.

It hasn't had a complete retrial. In the first trial, the judge (Alsup) ruled that APIs cannot be copyrighted. Google also had a fair-use defense, but didn't waste time on the trial with that, because Alsup had already ruled that APIs could not be copyrighted. Oracle lost that trial.

Oracle appealed, and at the appeals court won a ruling that APIs could be copyrighted. The case got sent back down for a trial that was only about the fair-use defense, not a complete retrial.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#156
post #142
post #104

If you found Sarah's coverage of the trial useful, she is accepting payments on PayPal since she was doing it with her own money: https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/731687243916529665

It costs her money to post on Twitter?

> Are you sure? Maybe her employers allowed it.

Or maybe we can just trust her.

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/732215116465213440

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#158

Despite the win, I think it would have been far better for the computer industry if Google had bought Sun. Unlike other companies with crap (IMHO ... Nokia, Motorola), Sun actually had stuff of value. This is a lesson that geeks get but I'm not sure MBAs do or will ever get.

Yeah. Thank you Sun, for ... everything, including employing the people you employed.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#159
post #156
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs her money to post on Twitter?

> Are you sure? Maybe her employers allowed it. Or maybe we can just trust her. https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/732215116465213440

Or maybe she was paid to write an article about the trial for Motherboard.

Re: Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

#160

Law evolves and the law of copyright in particular is ripe for "disruption" - and I say this not as one who opposes the idea of copyright but, on the contrary, as one who strongly supports it. It is right that the author of a creative work get protection for having conceived that work and reduced it to tangible form. Developers do this all the time with their code. So too do many, many others. Many today disagree wit…

People complain about the special interests, but some fail to realize that the major backers of Extreme Copyright (TM) are a special interest that we created.

We, the US public, out of the goodness of our hearts and wanting to foster art, gave up our right to "repeat what we heard" (copying, when what you hear is digital) in return for incentives to create art.

And then bam; decades later the incentives are the de facto baseline, and have been extended with almost no public awareness (let alone debate) using the special interest money that our goodwill created for them.

It is the ultimate checkmate of democracy, and if it weren't so unjust, you would have to hand it to the media industries for playing so masterfully.

Well, good job. You got us. You took the rules we made, and took the public (US, but even more abroad, by exporting your draconian laws via more special interest money) and absolutely destroyed us. You won. Game over.

But wait... not quite. The game is politics. And if you had been content to simply swim in your unimaginable Scrooge McDuck pool of gold dubloons, you would swim until the end of time. But the public is finally starting to notice, and the technorati whose careers and employers (like Google) depend on having a level playing field (even though they try to tilt it in their favor when they can) are starting to notice. I'm not so optimistic that change will come, but if it does, my vote will be for whatever is closest to "burn the fucker to the ground". And some other people feel the same way.

What's the possible consequence of such an extreme change? I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts. Fewer Kany Wests. Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Those are such small consequences that, to be honest, they might be additional benefits.

It would be best if the copyright system were reduced to a smouldering ruin, so that the public could better understand exactly what we gave up when the copyright regime was created, and make a more informed decision about which incentives really are needed to make innovation happen. Until we do, the special interests created by those very laws will continue to make us pay for the favor we gave them.

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