271–280 of 965 posts
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My understanding is no. Copyright requires human authorship (the case of the monkey selfie found it to be public domain because a monkey did it, e.g.), and code written by a machine is likely to follow similar precedent and be uncopyrightable.
Well if it's your monkey (or program) that generated it (music or art or whatever) and the monkey can't talk, what's to prevent you from copyrighting it?
Which of Breyer's clerks drafted this? They clearly understand many tech issues and I hope they find their place on some Federal circuit to herald an era of logic in tech law. "Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use. Google copied only what was needed to allow programmers to work in a different computing environment without discarding a portion of a familiar programming language. Google’s purpose…
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uBlock origin has a convenient font blocker, for what is worth. Saves many kilobytes, and readability.
It's not going to do much for a PDF :)
Actually, I've seen uBlock Origin's font blocker actually break font rendering on PDFs in Firefox in the past (maybe still today?).
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Oracle is making a lot of innovation in openjdk and graalvm. They have much better engineers than if e.g Google had bought sun.
Ah yes. The company that forbids people from benchmarking their database must be a bastion of good engineering.
It's interesting reading Thomas' dissent. As per typical Thomas appears to be arguing that it's the letter of the law that matters, whereas it's the majority opinion that the motivations and substance of the law are primary. Hackers and programmers tend to try and read the law like computer code to be "hacked" and exploited based on the letter of the law. So you'd expect us to be more sympathetic to Thomas' view. So…
Thomas's analysis pretty much starts from the conclusion that Google made billions off of Android, so therefore how could anything it be copied be fair use? He cloaks this analysis somewhat by arguing that the distinction between declaring and implementing code must be meaningless because Congress didn't lay it out explicitly in law, but for the person who actually broached the question of what other factors might in…
For better or worse, the same arguments ( "API is copyrightable" ) is what was used in the past to prevent 98's Microsoft from doing embrace-extend-extinguish to Java with their "JavaVM with P/Invoke'd Win32 API". The idea in that case was that when you try to implement something identical to the Java language and standard library, it doesn't matter if you call it Java or "Visual J++"; you are still implementing Java…
Microsoft lost because Microsoft had signed a contract with Sun, and was found to have broken the terms of the contract.
Google never signed a contract with Sun, so was free to act in ways that Microsoft was not.
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In the US, the Supreme Court is the static const readonly final. It's over. There is literally no route of appeal or any way Oracle can keep this case going without a whole new lawsuit. The Supreme Court can elect to make a ruling and then send it back to a smaller court _if they choose_ for final assessment, but they did not do that here, making this ruling definitive.
Oracle (or some other company) can bring another case. It has to be different enough that it isn't immediately struck down based on precedent, but similar enough that a ruling would require appealing to the Supreme Court and force them to overturn or invalidate the Oracle v Google precedent. The chance of this happening is negligible, but this is basically the conservative plan for getting the Supreme Court to overtu…
Most recently (that I'm aware of) is South Dakota v Wayfair. SCOTUS previously held that states couldn't impose sales tax on out-of-state companies. Subsequently, many states imposed "use taxes" which are essentially sales taxes paid by consumers on purchases they didn't pay sales tax already to get around this. Colorado passed a law which required out-of-state companies to essentially provide sales tax computation information to Colorado (but not sales tax itself), and Kennedy noted in his concurrence that maybe it was time to revisit the sales tax precedent. So South Dakota went ahead and passed a sales tax on out-of-state companies in direct violation of previous precedent, and SCOTUS promptly overturned that precedent when it heard the case.
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
Question from a layman: Does "interoperability" as a concept have any legal relevance here? Like focusing on programmer skills seems kind of beside the point, which is really for two pieces of software to be able to interoperate.
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That's literally the next sentence that you intentionally omitted. And I've seen plenty of people paint Oracle as some evil boogeyman like this is some good vs evil struggle. Oracle wasn't trying to make Bad Things happen. They were seeking damages from a damaging situation, and if bad things had happened... I'd blame the patent trolls and judges that enable them. Their insanity continues regardless of the verdict af…
Oracle wasn't trying to make Bad Things happen. I didn't say they were. They were seeking damages from a damaging situation, and if bad things had happened... I'd blame the patent trolls and judges that enable them. The issue at hand is about copyright not patents. And note that I'm not saying that nothing bad can, or will, ever happen again. I'm just saying that the consequences of this decision coming down the othe…
Please read the comment again, slowly.
You're saying "I've only seen people say we avoided very bad thing"
I'm saying that's simply not the case, plenty of people are attaching some sort of morality to this.
Edit: Case in point, the other reply to the comment is now one of those people.
And patent trolls and their sympathetic judges are 100% the same people who would have frenzy fed here, many of then (most?) are also copyright trolls in the context of software. In case you didn't know.
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Consider the following: gcd(X, Y) = X if X == Y or gcd(X - Y, Y) if Y Is this a formula? Should this be copyright-able?
Of course not, this is math; it is not copyrightable. It would have made perfect sense to Euclid. Some computers can understand this and execute it as if it were computer code. That's amazing! Kudos to those compute language designers and compiler authors. But their ingenuity does not suddenly grant copyright protection to anything their clever compilers can now understand.