231–240 of 771 posts
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A relevant point here that patents expire in ~decade or two, whereas copyright expires when Disney tells you it can expire (which is never). Not that expiring in a decade or two would help in the area of tech where stuff moves so fast.
It helps. Didn't MP3 patents expire recently? MP3 is far from obsolete.
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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.
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…
I think the Justices were struggling a bit for analogies, but got the basic gist of the difference between implementing code and declarations.
The difficulty is that they have to think about this in terms of the relevant legal concept (merger) not the relevant technical concept (interoperability). You can copyright expressions of ideas, but not ideas themselves. Merger doctrine says you can’t copyright an expression of an idea if there is only one way to express the idea, because then the idea “merged” into the expression.
Do declarations merge into the idea of the implantation? In some sense clearly they don’t. If you have a set of functions that operate on an object, the convention in C is to put the object first and the parameters after. You “append, into this vector, this value.” In Common Lisp, it’s often reversed. You “append this value to this vector.” Both express the same idea—a command for appending a value to a vector—but there is a creative choice in the expression.
But you can think of the same idea at a lower level. “Calling a function named push to append an element to a vector where the first parameter is the vector and the second parameter is the element.” In that case, there is really one way to express that idea. Why would you think of the “idea” at such a low level? Because that’s what you’re doing when you’re interfacing with an actual API. The “idea” isn’t some abstract hypothetical function for appending, it’s the actual “push” function with parameters in the specific order.
The problem is that interoperability is not really something that goes to copyright-ability, but fair use, which comes after copyrightability. Dictating how you see the “idea” based on interoperability seems a bit like a phase ordering violation.
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>>"that the conservative majority is predisposed to treat everything as property..." This is misleading at best. For example: RBG, despite her left-leaning reputation, was easily one of, if not the , most pro-copyright and pro-IP justices on the bench. (Relatedly, she also was pretty pro big business, which rarely fits the portrayed narrative.) Not all areas of law, especially at the Supreme Court level, easily trans…
Everyone freaks out about social issues with SCOTUS (which is understandable), but their real impact is on economics. The destruction they've laid on the labor movement and help for big businesses is immense. Just look at the commentary around overturning Chevron deference and non-delegation. Absolutely apocalyptic.
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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…
This article really overstates the case by focusing on copyrightability while leaving fair use for a tag at the end. Winning on fair use is not a disaster for Google. Google winning on fair use on procedural grounds, if the Court uses that as an excuse not to even answer the copyrightability question (the narrowest possible grounds for a Google victory), does not, contrary to the article's claim that "a Google win on…
This is not good...not good at all! If Oracle wins, to me with zero knowledge around copyright laws and legalese topics, means small to medium companies will close down out of fear of getting sued for using or implementing a competitor's APIs. Not only that, it feels like the whole technological "civilization" will collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating, because thousands of people will lose their job simply be…
One question from a judge was that if “API is copyrightable” is bad, why didn’t we see sky falling in last 4 years since federal court decided so?
Which was a fairly stupid question from a Supreme Court Justice, because you'd think that they know that decisions of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on issues not within their special subject matter jurisdiction (which copyright is not) are not binding authority on any lower court, as the lower courts (and, in fact, the CAFC itself) are bound by the actual precedent of the regional circuit court (even trial courts in, in this case, the Ninth Circuit, whose law the CAFC notionally was applying in its Oracle v. Google decision, are not bound by the CAFC ruling, only by decisions actually issued by the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court.)
So there is currently no binding precedent applicable to any federal trial court that APIs are copyrightable, which is why the sky hasn't fallen.
You would think that, however much they might not understand APIs, Supreme Court Justices would be intimitately familiar with the appellate structure of the US federal courts.
Let's say Google loses... badly. What will be the practical consequences for us software engineers?
The consequences will be that people will only use open standards and languages. Proprietary languages and APIs will be shunned because you'll be permanently locked in with compatible alternatives illegal.
Slightly OT but not really: why didn't Google buy Sun when it could?? I'll never understand this.
The problem for Google on the copyrightability front is that "compilations" of non-copyrightable items can be copyrightable even if the underlying items themselves are not, if the "selection, coordination, or arrangement" of those items involves sufficient creativity to be considered an "original work of authorship".
For example, individual recipes are generally not copyrightable, but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.
As applied to Java, individual method signatures like min and max might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and organize those individual methods into classes, and organize those classes into packages. That act of organization likely implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures are not.
What's worse for Google is that code has always been considered copyrightable so arguing that APIs are non-copyrightable is essentially carving out an exception for a specific type of code.
As is common when HN discusses legal matters I see a lot of people blaming the judges for not understanding tech, but the problem here isn't really the judges so much as the law itself. We should not be surprised if Oracle ends up winning here, at least on the question of copyrightability. Google may have an out related to fair use, but that seems like a long shot as well.