Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#531

Post by lilott8 » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 2:54 AM UTC

ABCLAW wrote: post #319

maire wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does this not apply, in any way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright#History_of_...

I don't understand how this is never brought up with regard to API copyright. API's are software, software has been deemed copyright-able, thus, API's are copyright-able.

Am I going crazy or missing something?

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#532

Post by kbutler » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:04 AM UTC

na85 wrote: post #527

kbutler wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which lawyers in what context do you see providing that nuanced human perspective? Corporate law? Their job is keep us from getting sued. Family law? If you're advocating that human perspective for the opposing party, are you failing your duty to your client? Prosecutors? Not sure they have that discretion. General legal services, probate, etc. Doesn't seem that applicable. Intellectual Property? Human perspective? U…

Every single point in this post is a broad-brush generalization perpetuated by media stereotypes.

And by limited personal interactions in professional capacities.

I'd love for you to provide countering perspectives from your broader exposure.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#533

Post by wilonth » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:06 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #146

baldfat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reverse engineering That is certainly an issue if you reverse engineer anything. Google went out of their way to NOT reverse engineer it. The issue is can a public API be copyrighted. That is the scary issue.

I don't get why it's a scary issue or even controversial why an API would be subject copyright. An API, in my mind, is similar to design drawings or blueprints. Independently figuring out how to implement those drawings doesn't change the fact that you copied the design.

Design drawings is an implementation, not an API. Copying a drawing is like copy-pasting code from someone else. Something akin to API in art would be style. If you allow style to be copyrightable, it would mean any apps following the Material Design style, for example, would infringe Google's copyright.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#534

Post by ABCLAW » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:13 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #521

ABCLAW wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't choose to mingle those things. That's just plain what the facts are. I get that you don't like them, but that's tough beans. The case goes into discussing this directly, indicating that Google's cleanroom efforts give it evidence that it proceeded in good faith, but good faith alone does not intrinsically absolve you of admitted copying (which is an infringement) that's found elsewhere. Now if you did an ACT…

>> I didn't choose to mingle those things. That's just plain what the facts are. I get that you don't like them, but that's tough beans. There are two things in play here and they are NOT the same. The one the whole world cares about is weather APIs are copyrightable. Weather Google is guilty of copying part of Oracles implementation of the code behind the API is not relevant to API copyrightability. If you can't see…

You've been pointed towards resources that answer all of the issues you've raised, but you haven't read them. Suffice it to say, the decisions do not agree that Google's behavior here is not relevant in determining how to deal with the copyright issue.

Whether or not the supreme court agrees with the IPRs affirmed in this series of cases is another question entirely, but until that comes down, nothing has really changed.

Happy reading.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#535

Post by ABCLAW » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #464

ABCLAW wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google specifically decided not to use 'interoperability' as a functional objective constraining their code design because there was a wall of evidence against that interpretation. There's a comprehensive write-up elsewhere in this thread about it.

I have read it, and I disagree. I am not arguing that Google has an interoperability exemption. I am arguing that the API is not (or should not be) copyrightable in the first place , because any attempt at interoperability would instantly void it. I would also argue that interoperability with the training of masses of developers is a thing. Saying it is not only strengthens the relevant network effects, which is bad…

>I am arguing that the API is not (or should not be) copyrightable in the first place, because any attempt at interoperability would instantly void it.

The court specifically deals with this assertion and does not come to the conclusion that you do.

>And overall, it is very weird that Google's intent matters here.

No it isn't. This case was about Fair use, and intention matters for some of the test elements. A bunch of people think this case is about API copywritability. They're four years too late to complain.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#536

Post by ABCLAW » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #453

ABCLAW wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't choose to mingle those things. That's just plain what the facts are. I get that you don't like them, but that's tough beans. The case goes into discussing this directly, indicating that Google's cleanroom efforts give it evidence that it proceeded in good faith, but good faith alone does not intrinsically absolve you of admitted copying (which is an infringement) that's found elsewhere. Now if you did an ACT…

"I get that you don't like them, but that's tough beans." It's hard to overstate how difficult it is to separate what you want the law to be from what it is. This is why people do so badly at representing themselves, and even lawyers have this problem.

Yep. There is a ton of layperson misinformation in this thread motivated by how people 'feel' about certain issues without actually reading the decisions or understanding the tests in question. There are laypeople literally getting angry at me that the court didn't say what they think is right.

Oh well. I hope some people found it useful.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#537

Post by shagie » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:23 AM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #493

shagie wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original use of JavaScript was to pass DOM information to the applet and back. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... and https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in... are the docs for this largely forgotten functionality.

There was no DOM back in the early days of Javascript. The page was rendered in a single pass, you could inject text and markup via document.write() and anything "dynamic" was accomplished by reloading an IFRAME. Remember, these were the days when too many tables would crash your browser; I recall the early demos of Gecko showing deeply nested tables, and all styling was with font tags still. Netscape was still tryin…

Maybe the 'DOM' wasn't the right word choice. However, in 1995 one could foo = document.getElementById and foo.innerHTML as described in https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...

It was possible to call JavaScript from a Java applet and method in a Java applet from JavaScript (on a web page).

This functionality can be seen in Java 2 (now known as Java 1.2) - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/basics-137133.html .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release... has JavaScript and Java as part of the same release for Netscape. The next release of Netscape Navigator (3.0) had LiveConnect version 1 ( http://web.mit.edu/javascript/src/mozilla/js/src/liveconnect... ) which was that cross language communication.

I would be willing to contend that in the view of "Java applets are where the web is going" back then, the difficulty of communication between the applet and the enclosing page was something that needed some scripting glue and that JavaScript, from its inception, was to be that glue. It took about a year to get it working, but this was the initial goal of JavaScript.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#538

Post by scoggs » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #386

grellas wrote: post #355

Appellate courts do not lightly overturn jury verdicts using highly fact-specific reviews of evidence. There is a reason they call a jury a "trier of fact". There is a reason for this: if it were the rule that an appellate court could easily step in and second-guess how a jury weighs evidence, there would be little room for finality with jury verdicts because lawyers are very skilled (and become very tiresome) endles…

"In this case, the Federal Circuit Court did what amounted a wholesale second-guessing of what the jury concluded about the facts here." It's worse than that. They are supposed to be applying ninth circuit law, and they roundly haven't throughout the entire appeals. They've made a complete mess of it. First in copyrightability, and now fair use. There are even ninth circuit judges who have spoken out about this.

For someone who is very much on the outside of understanding this situation, if you think you know enough to comment on it overall, would you say that they are mishandling it due to generally misunderstanding the gravity of the verdicts they are handing out or is it more to do with not precisely understanding the technology, what goes into creating such technology, how technology is propagated and improved, and how that diaspora of code and information winds up becoming the open or closed source "fabric" of what we know as computing today?

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#539

Post by monocasa » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #465

michaelmrose wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bugs nobody files then? Why do you think this is a useful distinction. Either APIs aren't copyrightable or we should pass a law that says they aren't immediately.

Bugs are a red-herring to the discussion. Bugs doesn't get you out of copying. The question is: did you copy or not? Google argued "we certainly did copy but APIs can't be copyrighted." Which was not the law at the time they did the copying and is not the law now .

Except it is the law now and then that APIs aren't copyrightable according to the court that's generally supposed to handle such things, in this instance The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. They've ruled plenty of times on the matter, and have developed decades of case law stating that implementing APIs is totally kosher. Sony v. Bleem is great example. There the appeals court ruled that not only could Bleem ship a PS1 emulator with reverse engineered APIs of the kernel (explicitly as a commercial venture even!), but they could port it to a competitor's game console (the Dreamcast), and use Sony's IP in screenshots.

But, because Oracle v. Google case had an ancillary patent question in an earlier appeal, the appeals are instead going to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This court is really only supposed to answer patent questions. The CAFC can't set precedent in these matters, and overwhelmingly defers to the district courts' precedent. Bot for some reason they have chose to ignore all of that this time and make their own, fresh (and super weak) precedent that only applies to copyright cases with patent questions.

Re: Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google

#540

Post by ggm » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 4:14 AM UTC

andybak wrote: post #479

I just read the sub-thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16691774 onwards and started nodding in agreement at the fine arguments therein. But then sanity hit me in the face like a damp glacier and I remembered the 9 lines of code in question. Please anyone who's ever programmed anything; take a step back and tell me this is sane. Tell me there's not a billion cases like this out there waiting for a lawyer…

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there are a rough Fermi-number million or more, of this kind of event, and this decision, which most people in the practice of writing software would consider a massive reversal, quite aside from being a retrograde step, implies that both sides of the deal are now in some sense duty-bound to investigate.

You could be the unwitting, unintending offendor by trivial API copying, entirely normal in your prior working experiences.

You could now be the person who has to inform senior staff that due to this decision, code your company owns as IPR is the subject of this kind of copying.

Think about it: If you discovered that any activity you did was now potentially valuable in a lawsuit to generate income, by what right do you not inform senior staff? What you feel about the lawsuit is distinct from your obligation as a company officer, regarding its status surely?