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Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#221

Post by c-smile »

doesnotexist wrote: post #128

Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to d…

> Should Oracle win this case, ... Free Software ...

Hmmm... First Free Software project that will dye after this is WINE that implements Windows API ( https://www.winehq.org/ )

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#222

Post by merb »

treis wrote: post #131
tasubotadas wrote: post #10

>Oracle, for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to Oracle's rival cloud platform. So if Oracle wins here, they will get fu xx ed by Amazon?

Amazon release their S3 client libraries under the Apache license. Creating a backend for that client is permitted under the license. So all these S3 clones are fine.

not really. their client is under the apache license but not the implementation of the server, where the api is defined.

to use the client (boto) with a server you need to CLONE the api. even the headers which are named: "x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-algorithm" I doubt that oracle would need to call that "x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-algorithm"

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#223

Post by jmalicki »

Jtsummers wrote: post #207
jmalicki wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see IBM try to sue Oracle for the entirety of its history of database revenues over its use of their SQL API...

SQL is an ISO standard. IBM would only have grounds if any part of Oracle's implementation implemented a proprietary portion of an IBM database implementation. This is the positive thing about standards, it removes ambiguity around what people can/should implement and present to users of the systems.

Also note that even for established patents, a ton of standards standardized patented technology, and implementing the standard requires a patent license! This is a huge part of how Qualcomm makes its patent revenue from 3G/4G implementors.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#224

Post by Spivak »

defen wrote: post #200
fdye wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really sucks is this was a perfect time for a lawyer to use Justice Thomas' analogy to better explain the difference. I would have tried something like: "Close your honor, but let me expand on this further. Imagine instead that your opponent publishes their calls and they are regularly available to all individuals of the general public. However, while they may describe a call for going long, they do not give any…

If I were Oracle's lawyer, I'd respond by saying that you can have the concept of "go long", but you can't literally name it "go long" because there was an act of creativity involved in mapping that name onto the concept of a receiver running far down the field. So you have to call it "go deep" or whatever.

It's not about the names though. It's that when you look at playbooks for both teams you see that the names of all the plays are identical, and under the same headings! And you come to the conclusion that the second team must have copied the names from the first teams playbook.

Such a thing might be considered fair use if the second team's argument was they indeed copied the playbook because they had a recruited some players from the first team and keeping the names the same made it easier for them during practice. But for now the judge is suspicious that they've come up with this explanation after the fact.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#225

Post by wang_li »

interestica wrote: post #123
Aqueous wrote: post #6

This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a disaster for software everywhere. If APIs become copyrightable, what happens to any open source software the implements a proprietary API? Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible to teach them the difference between interface and implementation within the parameters…

> Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. It's why silly (and inadequate) analogies emerge: "Justice Clarence Thomas compared Google's copying of the Java APIs to a football team taking a rival's playbook."

On a pure intelligence question the justices are likely top 1% or 2% among human populations. They also have disciplined minds that allow them to use their intelligence effectively.

It’s more likely the arstechniva writer failed to understand the point of the analogy.

Having just listen to the audio, it really annoyed me that Google’s lawyer kept saying “If we can’t copy this it would be impossible to write software.” And always left of the “in Java” part. Really fucking misleading.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#226

Post by chabad360 »

ColanR wrote: post #175

I wonder if Oracle winning would reinvigorate software developement - by which I mean, maybe the resulting fragmentation would leave a lot of room for new ideas to be developed. e.g.: if this court case was decided before Google made Android, then Google would have had to use something other than Java to do it and they wouldn't have been able to attract such a large developer base to make apps. Maybe they would have…

Fragmentation is almost never a good thing and it's certainly not a good thing in this case. Allowing developers to use the same knowledge, the same interfaces, the se languages across systems means that consumers benefit. Having a de facto standard is good for everyone, and arguing that there is less innovation in programming because you don't own the rights to function names is ridiculous.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#227

Post by didibus »

I would make the argument that what distinguishes APIs from code is that APIs cannot be executed, they are not code because the computer cannot run it. And only code is copyrightable, code requires to be executable on some machine. Thus it is clear that only the implementation is copyrightable.

That said, at this point, I don't even care about the interpretation of the law, this issue has to just be addressed by the executive branch, truth be told, the rules should be explicitly stated, and I almost feel someone could make a case and sue the government with being so vague, allowing multi billion businesses to get built and a whole industry assuming they had the correct interpretation of the law, when in fact it gets interpreted differently. I don't know if this is possible to sue the government for, but like, how enraging is it if everyone for years clearly thinks they know the rules and all abide by some interpretation of it worth billions of dollars. Clearly the law needed to be revised a long time ago.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#228

Post by hugi »

xoxoy wrote: post #211
doesnotexist wrote: post #128

Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to d…

The Google lawyer should be fired. I can’t believe you’d put the best of the best in front of the SC and the guy didn’t even sound like he could describe what an API actually is in non-technical terms. I don’t see how he represented the best legal representation Google could buy.

Indeed. This was bad representation to the point that I'm wondering if it was intentional. Google might have recently realized that, as a monopoly, fighting for API freedom perhaps isn't in their best interest.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#229

Post by granzymes »

The article mentions that Google faced some tough questions on their merger doctrine argument (that because there was only one way to implement the declaring code Oracle can’t preclude Google from reusing it) but it doesn’t really mention the fact that Oracle faced much tougher questioning on their procedural argument that the Federal Circuit correctly overturned the district court jury decision.

Listening to the oral arguments I have a hard time counting to 5 either way on the issue of API copyright and Google’s merger doctrine argument, but I think it’s quite likely that there are 5 votes to send the case back to the Federal Circuit with instructions to take another look at fair use.

Essentially, the district court jury found in favor of Google on fair use and the Federal Circuit set that verdict aside on the grounds that no reasonable person could conclude there was fair use. None of the justices sounded happy about that.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#230

Post by stickfigure »

ColanR wrote: post #175

I wonder if Oracle winning would reinvigorate software developement - by which I mean, maybe the resulting fragmentation would leave a lot of room for new ideas to be developed. e.g.: if this court case was decided before Google made Android, then Google would have had to use something other than Java to do it and they wouldn't have been able to attract such a large developer base to make apps. Maybe they would have…

...or it could mean that we'd all still be writing COBOL on OS/360.

It's a terrible idea.

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