341–350 of 643 posts
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How many ways are there to define max? Surely AT&T should turn around and sue Oracle for lifting max(a, b) from stdlib. Or maybe SCO will rise from the grave and try it again.
An infinite number of ways. Call it max(b,a) [i.e., reverse the order of b and a inputs]. But Google didn't do any of that. They copied.
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OpenJDK didn't exist when Google developed Android, so it would have been very hard for them to use it.
The first commercial release of android was 2008, the first release of openjdk was 2006. It wouldn't be that hard to start with an openjdk repo, and delete all the files as you added in the davlik code. Release it as GPL, and call it a derivative work. Not that I think they should have to do that just for the sake of implementing the API
They've done just that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803775
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The 1% that's different being... what? Bugs? Like I said, any differences in Google's version of the API would, by definition, be interoperability problems that need to be corrected. To make that more concrete: if Oracle's string concatenation function is called `String.concat` and Google's is called `String.append`, then code which calls `String.concat` isn't going to work with Google's implementation, and code whic…
The 1% will be things like String.methodNoOneUses or ObscureClass. Even if they aren't identical they will be close enough for 99.999% of the programs people write.
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RE> Nature of the Copyrighted Work: Dealt with previously In my entire career you could not copyright an API. There is good reason for this. If you wanted to do business with certain entities, the implementation had to be multisource. The new implementation had to come from a cleanroom, but in this case it came from open source (which seems equivalent). Therefore you have one judge making one decision that is an anom…
There's a lot of similar responses regarding the API copyright issue. APIs have been 'subject to copyright' for 4 years, since the 2014 decision in this case. Lets see some key details: This is the 2012 ruling: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf Alsup indicates that SSO isn't dead law, but finds that APIs aren't copyrightable because they are 'the only one way to write" things to get the key functionality…
I read page 17 and it is clearly written by someone that doesn't understand software. My non-lawyer reading of the justification implies that polymorphism violates copyright law - which is an even deeper issue. This would destroy all modern software development. Yikes! I am now even more confused. Even Oracle would disagree with this point of view.
In your text, you are now making the argument that Google did not have a cleanroom implementation. This is a different discussion that should be on it's own thread.
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If the BIOS API was copyrightable, they would have had to do nothing and simply declare that they owned the copyright to the API and thus no clones. Since they couldn't do that, they had to go to the extra step.
Replying to your comment below. I am not missing your point. I am merely pointing out that your point is incorrect as a matter of law. Copyright does not cover re-implementation. Copyright only covers copying. Your statement that IBM could sue company using a clean-room developed re-implementation of IMB's BIOS if IBM owned a copyright to their BIOS is incorrect as a matter of law.
Coypright covers derivative works of copyright-protected works, as well as literal copies. If APIs are copyrightable, there is a very good case to be made that a reimplementation of an API implementation (not an API that serves a similar function, but an actual reimplementation) is a derivative work of the API itself.
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What? No those are the same thing. Why is an API suddenly not copyrightable if its 0x51234 offset 5 bits, vs human readable text? That is nonsense. Numbers and words should not be treated differently. What if I named my function 015342342(String 123949)? How does that change anything?
Copyright has a creativity requirement. I can easily see a court ruling that 0x51234 bit 5 is not creative whereas SetBrickMode(true) has a spark of creativity in that it could have been named multiple things. Without endorsement, there is definitely a line between text in which one can be "creative" and numbers in copyright law as written. The problem here isn't the line between creative and non-creative, the proble…
The choice of call name in an API are arbitrary, the reuse of those names to interface with that API is not a creative copy it's a technical requirement.
If I make a toothed belt to fit a pair of gears, that's not an artistic expression no matter the the tooth pitch is an exact duplicate of that on the gears. If the gear is purple and orange spots, in a distinctive pattern, and I make my belt the same pattern then that's a copyright issue.
If the API calls were like "thisIsTheSummerOfOurDiscoTents(banana)" - such that the names are sufficient to be individual works of art, and weren't following a technical function, then perhaps you have an argument that the API is a work of literature, or otherwise an artistic creation.
It just sounds like a wrong decision was previously made and should now be overturned.
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Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be. I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from…
I think it's important to remember what copyright is meant to protect -- expressions of ideas. You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. You can't copyright medicine. There is a bit of a "intellectual property" slippy slope going on here. Whether or not something is useful or non-trivial is inconsequential.
You could design an engine to have an artistic structure. What you couldn't then do is stop anyone copying the functional parts of the engine and leaving out the purely artistic elements.
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The court has made the point now that literally just the class and method names are subject to copyright.
Isn't Java open source? (Does this not include the APIs that are part of it?)
PS: I am not a lawyer. Above piece of knowledge is coming just from what I read, perhaps on HN during the previous ruling on the case.