161–170 of 965 posts
What kinds of actions and motivations by Google could have led to a determination that the use was not fair?
Or is Embrace/Extend/Extinguish as practiced by the big tech companies now always protected by fair use?
I don't understand why people uses such stupid font style -_-
This is one of the most important legal decisions in the history of software. The US Supreme Court has basically just saved the whole software industry (and FOSS projects) from being wrecked by patent trolls.
Had the ruling gone in Oracle's favor I can imagine some greedy company trying to procedurally-generate every API and copyright them all similar to this project which tried to copyright all musical melodies: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne... In the case of the music project, it was for the protection of the community, but I can imagine such a system being used selfishly for software APIs…
Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you're generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself.
Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built?
Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system?
For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API.
If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation's copyright.
edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)), flex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...), YACC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Yacc), and bison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Bison).
If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn't the generated code be copyrightable?
This is one of the most important legal decisions in the history of software. The US Supreme Court has basically just saved the whole software industry (and FOSS projects) from being wrecked by patent trolls.
Page 44 has Thomas’s dissent with Alito concurring. Worth a read as well, even just to see the opposing arguments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. There is no appellate court above the Supreme Court. The only way things could change now is if Congress/President passed a new law, and I don’t think API copyrights are near the top of the list.
> There is no appellate court above the Supreme Court. That is true. > The only way things could change now is if Congress/President passed a new law That isn't true at all; the Supreme Court is free to change the law by itself. Someone could sue over the same question and get a different result overruling this one.
This has impact beyond APIs. The Supreme Court says copying User Interface is fair use. Excerpts: The nature of the work at issue favors fair use. The copied lines of code are part of a “user interface” that provides a way for programmers to access prewritten computer code through the use of simple commands. As a result, this code is different from many other types of code, such as the code that actually instructs th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This argument is hard to swallow: > declaring code would satisfy the general test for copyrightability.. they are expressed in “words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols It is common knowledge that mathematical formulae & equations, which are also expressed in words, numbers, and symbols, do not have copyright protection. > Copyright protection is therefore not available for... mathematical principles; for…
This is not a persuasive argument because, by your logic, function implementations are also mathematical formulas and everyone agrees that they are copyrightable.
A formula is an idea. It describes the nature of something computable. It does not explain how to compute.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_algorithm
The programmer must understand the formula in order to write computer code that implements it. The result is a creative/expressive work which is copyrightable.