Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

Post by kevin_b_er » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #68

tapoxi wrote: post #14

If this (somehow) succeeds, could IBM sue Oracle over SQL compatibility?

IBM contributed SQL to international standards (Or is it just ANSI? I don't care too look that up), so probably not. It isn't clear though, joining ISO generally requires you to license your patents for a "reasonable price" (Reasonably for a big company, tens to thousands of dollars....), but of course IBM didn't agree to that back then, so would courts say IBM implicitly agreed to the standards of the day where it w…

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #422

pjmlp wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which even after their adoption of OpenJDK still isn't compatible out of the box with the standard library available at https://adoptopenjdk.net/ In 2020 it is still pretty much hint and miss getting a Java library working without changes on Android, given that the Android team cherry picks whatever they feel like from OpenJDK for their own Android API implementation purposes. Easily to find that out from Gerrit comm…

Nothing happens to the interoperability argument. Nothing says it need to be 100% interoperable, or else you wouldn't be able to ship an MVP for any reimplementation of an API. And hell, the official JDK isn't even 100% interoperable with it's past selves. Maybe if Sun didn't play games with access to the TCK in the past we wouldn't be here adn there'd be a valid test for compliance that wasn't "do what the official…

Post by salawat » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #405

salawat wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have a bit of trouble with the concept "the threshhold of too much", too, as it applies to this case. Google copied or paraphrased essentially _all_ of the text of interfaces they used from Java libraries Oracle is trying to argue that just because you intentionally left a bunch of implementation detail out because it isn't relevant toward transforming something like the Java API's to a new context, it should stil…

Oracle's argument isn't legally circular or anything like that. It's actually very strong, which is why it's problematic: the industry status-quo consensus that you can't copyright APIs has no obvious basis in copyright law beyond the notion that you can't copyright "facts". Is an API a collection of facts? I would hate to be a lawyer tasked with arguing this one in front of the Supremes. Programmers sweat bullets ov…

Post by still_grokking » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #266

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing much? This isn't just about the Java API. This is about EVERY API. You might not be able to write a web server anymore, depending on who owns the copyright for HTTP. You didn't invent GET, PUT, and POST, you thieving copyright abuser.

Back when I was working for Nokia, the APIs were patented, this is nothing new.

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #424

pjmlp wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if Google had bought Sun after torpedoing it, we wouldn't be having this discussion and everyone was enjoying a Go style management with Java stuck at version 6.

You shouldn't have to buy someone to ship a competing implementation. And Sun wasn't torpedoed. Do you have anything else to pivot to?