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Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

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Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#21

Post by seabee »

bad_user wrote: post #17
nknight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting principles, tax law, and theft laws are far easier for the layman to understand than programming. They deal with accounting and taxes in their everyday lives, and they understand it's wrong to steal. The principles are taught to every child in our society and they put them to practical use throughout their lives. None of this applies to programming, which bears only the most tenuous of relationships to any…

Most people are exposed to math and to cookbook recipes for cooking food, both areas having strong relationships with programming. What is harder to grasp is that programming is an intersection of math with cooking. And cookbook recipes are copyrightable, while math is not. And so the burden lies on the lawyer to describe the relationship between an algorithm and the math behind it. That isn't necessarily hard, but r…

> And cookbook recipes are copyrightable

Are you sure about that?

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

The parts which make it a recipe are not copyrightable. That is analogous to comments in source code, I think...

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#22

Post by polshaw »

ars wrote: post #19
gouranga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement. The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

and how, generally, is this provable? (at least, to produce 'reasonable doubt' to a layman)

(ignoring that the guy seems to have said he copy-pasted here.)

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#23

Post by j_baker »

nknight wrote: post #15
j_baker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor can they be expected to understand accounting principles in accounting fraud cases. Nor can they be expected to understand tax law in tax cases. Heck, you really can't rely on them to understand theft laws in cases of theft. In fact, I'd reckon that we rely on jurors to understand very little. That's what the lawyers are there for: to present the evidence and make the case (based on the testimony of experts) to a…

Accounting principles, tax law, and theft laws are far easier for the layman to understand than programming. They deal with accounting and taxes in their everyday lives, and they understand it's wrong to steal. The principles are taught to every child in our society and they put them to practical use throughout their lives. None of this applies to programming, which bears only the most tenuous of relationships to any…

Yes, but do you think the average layman knows enough to say, convict Enron of accounting fraud? Clearly not. I mean, a significant number of accountants didn't know enough.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#24

Post by obtino »

j_baker wrote: post #13
rfugger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Boies reportedly asked, with the jury out of the room, for "infringer's profits" from the nine lines. Judge Alsup said it was "bordering on the ridiculous."

I'm a bit curious what profits Oracle expects to take. Google isn't profiting off of Android (that I know of) except in the sense that it makes for more people who are willing to use their search engines. That's pretty difficult to quantify. How do you determine whether a search from Android wouldn't have been made from some other platform (say an iPhone) had Android not existed?

If a manufacturer wishes to provide Google services (such as Google Play, GMail, GTak) with their device, Google will charge them a fee for their deployment of Android on a per-device basis.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#25

Post by ars »

polshaw wrote: post #22
ars wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement. The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

and how, generally, is this provable? (at least, to produce 'reasonable doubt' to a layman) (ignoring that the guy seems to have said he copy-pasted here.)

Why ignore it? That's exactly how.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#26

Post by grandpoobah »

emeraldd wrote: post #7
thereallurch wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From OpenJDK: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex + ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")"); if (fromIndex arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); } From Google: private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) { if (fromIndex > toIndex) throw new IllegalArgume…

Given a method signature, especially one with the parameter names, and a listing of the exceptions it could throw, I think the only thing I would do different would be comments and {} on the if's. I hate if's without braces, that's just asking for trouble in the future ;)

But it makes the code prettier

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#27

Post by myko »

ars wrote: post #19
gouranga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement. The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

Of course in this case the person who wrote it is also the same person who copied it.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#28

Post by wtallis »

dchest wrote: post #16
carbocation wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; he copied it from himself.

This would be the case if copyright wasn't transferable. AFAIK, he wrote it while working for Google, thus the owner of his code was Google, which then transferred/donated the ownership to Sun. He testified that he copied the code which he didn't own anymore. This is all pretty fucked up, but that's what the law is.

I don't think that's right - elsewhere in this thread is a quote from his testimony where he says it wasn't done for Google, so it wasn't a work for hire. Rules are different for works of corporate authorship and personal authorship. Most significantly, in the case of personal authorship, the author is allowed to take back their copyright if at least 35 years have elapsed since the grant of copyright to another party.

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#29

Post by [deleted] »

seabee wrote: post #21
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are exposed to math and to cookbook recipes for cooking food, both areas having strong relationships with programming. What is harder to grasp is that programming is an intersection of math with cooking. And cookbook recipes are copyrightable, while math is not. And so the burden lies on the lawyer to describe the relationship between an algorithm and the math behind it. That isn't necessarily hard, but r…

> And cookbook recipes are copyrightable Are you sure about that? http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html The parts which make it a recipe are not copyrightable. That is analogous to comments in source code, I think...

[deleted]

Re: Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

#30

Post by __alexs »

ars wrote: post #19
gouranga wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement. The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

I thought the case was not even about copyright infringement of code but of the APIs i.e. the function names and arguments?

The OpenJDK is GPL'd after all, and well, an argument could be made that Google are infringing by distributing GPLd rangeCheck with the Apache license, Oracle aren't doing that afaik.

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