341–350 of 965 posts
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> This is a large scale defeat of the GPL and dual licensing Can you elaborate on that? What does this have to do with those thing?
Google had the option to use the OpenJDK and make Android a GPL-based platform. They did not want to. They could've, and tried to, negotiate a separate license, but simply decided to copy what they wanted instead, relying on their legal team to protect them.
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That's a very good summary. This is a case where there probably is no legally "correct" decision based on the law/precedent. It comes down to fair use and to what degree you can reasonably extend it to this case. For most people reading this, the decision is the "right" one. But I'm not sure to what degree one side or the other is better supported as a matter of law/precedent.
I strongly agree with the outcome but the cost in the other direction is good API design is a creative process. If you sit down and design a kick-ass API for a year, another person who re-implements is inheriting that design, and its benefits, for free. I do wonder if another case will wind its way up one day where the defendant lifted the API not for interoperability but because it was a clean or clever interface. (…
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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.
Any computable function can be written the way I wrote the function that is equivalent to Euclid's algorithm. Does it means no computable function is copyright-able or not copyright-able if written that way?
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My first manager, when I was a young engineer at Raytheon would like a word.
It's 2021 and I still come across managers that use this as a metric.
Well, "dollars / year", if you work in an industry where you can directly A-B test against revenue, but I think most of us are happiest not knowing whether our particular lines of code are EV-positive.
From the dissent: > The Copyright Act expressly protects computer code. It recognizes that a “computer program” is protected by copyright... And it defines “‘computer program’” as “a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result.” §101. That definition clearly covers declaring code—sets of statements that indirectly perform computer function…
public int max(int x, int y);
Is a program that tells a compiler or VM to add an entry to its public symbol table that allows it to compile or execute third-party code utilizing this function, and that the declaration, by itself, then qualified as a computer program and could be copyrighted, where would you draw a limit? Would two different programs that produce identical assembly instructions infringe on each other's copyright?
What about system calls for an OS? For example, Linux system calls have names, but they also have numeric identifiers. If someone copied Linux system call names in a new BSD-licensed OS, would they violate the GPL? What if they only copied the numbers?
It's interesting to think about. I'm glad this was the minority opinion.
Does anyone have a good estimate of what this case cost Oracle and Google, especially in terms of legal fees, and where that money went ultimately?
The money goes into lawyers fees. Because of the way this decision went, I’m sure Google considers it a worthy investment and Oracle considers it a temporary setback as it pursues other extortion schemes using Sun’s Patents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a specific division of lawyers dedicated to finding novel ways of extorting wealth using Patents; this would likely just be one of the cases they were working…
They bought Sun 12 years ago...not much time left to pursue that...
Although I applaud the effect of this decision, I can't help but agree with Clarence Thomas that the reasoning behind it is not sound. It waffles back and forth between arguments for fair use and arguments that APIs are not (or at least should not be) copyrightable in the first place. You can't have it both ways. If APIs are copyrightable (and a plain reading of the text of the law appears to indicate that they are)…
You seem to have misunderstood the idea of fair use. Fair use is a specific doctrine covering the acceptable ("fair") use of copyrighted works. Fair use of a non-copyrightable work would be, technically speaking, a contradiction in terms.
See, for example, the US copyright office's explanation: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html The first sentence is "Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances."
Furthermore, there is no requirement that fair use be non-commercial. It is more likely that the courts will find that non-commercial use is fair, but that is not a hard and fast rule. An easy example here is book reviews quoting passages from the text.
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I suppose it makes sense from the perspective of copyright law, which protects artifacts. After all, one could say the same for quoting from a famous literary work .."ha now they're valuing literature in terms of number of words of prose!"
The dissent clearly highlights the fallacy of the ruling, where it discussed the importance of the "heart" of the work, rather than the portion of exact lines copied. Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.
Would that be a copyright infringement? Probably just trademark infringement at that point?
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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?
Judge William Alsup learned to code for this case, and was therefore able to avoid a lot of the BS being peddled around the significance of some of the code: > The argument centered on a function called rangeCheck. ... It was in Oracle’s interest to play up the significance of rangeCheck as much as possible, and David Boies, Oracle’s lawyer, began to argue that Google had copied rangeCheck so that it could take Andro…
I just took a look at the rangeCheck: https://majadhondt.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/googles-9-lines/ Is this example correct? Can someone explain to me how this: if (toIndex > arrayLen) is correct? If the array length is say 5, and toIndex is 5, that should still throw an index out of bounds exception, right? But it would be acceptable here.
Here is Dijkstra's opinion on why:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...