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Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

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Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#671

Post by johncolanduoni »

zucker42 wrote: post #133
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google wasn't interested in interoperability. A big part of why they allegedly walked away from Java licensing was Oracle wanted Android to actually run Java apps, and Google wanted to basically fork off, but just benefit from the developer community around the Java language.

Can't you use many Java libraries on Android? Interoperable doesn't mean "exactly the same".

There were a number of Java standard library incompatibilities that various libraries have had to adapt to, until they switched the library implementation to OpenJDK.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#672

Post by belorn »

thayne wrote: post #633
mumblemumble wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, going back to the max() function example: I believe, based on the way the courts are looking at it, that the parts that are essential to its function are the fact that it takes two numbers and returns the greater of the two, and perhaps also the fact that it is named "max". Its being placed into class named java.lang.Math, though, is not. That is a product of the way it is arranged, which is a matter of design, n…

> ts being placed into class named java.lang.Math, though, is not. That is a product of the way it is arranged, which is a matter of design, not of necessity. It's hard to imagine any particular reason why a function would need to have "java" in its name in order correctly calculate the maximum of two numbers. But if you want to be interoperable with programs that expect to be able to find the max of two numbers usin…

Compatibility seems more like an fair use argument and has been argued in the past for hardware in order to allow fair use access to copyrighted material. There is however a distinction between being compatible and being market substitute for the original work, with the later being much more problematic from a copyright perspective.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#673

Post by tylerchr »

sergeykish wrote: post #638
tylerchr wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is {X} copyrightable? Evidently yes, to the extent that {X} includes subjective properties that go beyond the fundamental function of {X}. To use file formats as an example, the fundamental function of an archive file format is to bundle a set of otherwise-independent files together. A basic archive file format that simply concatenates file contents together (and I guess the necessary header to identify the boundar…

Are you sure you've described copyright and not patent?

No.

I thought copyrights protect literary and visual illustrations, but not any underlying processes, mechanisms, or artifacts they describe (patents protect those). My understanding of copyright law is surely flawed, and perhaps the “original work” standard means that only descriptions of systems are copyrightable and not the systems themselves.

In that case I agree that my examples fail. Keys and clutches are mechanisms and filling gas is a process, and those aren’t copyrightable (but they are patentable). The file format example fails too, because the concept of laying out data in a particular way is a mere idea, and ideas aren’t copyrightable either (they are also not patentable, though a description of the format is copyrightable and a specific process for reading or writing the file might be patentable if it were nontrivial).

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#674

Post by IshKebab »

mumblemumble wrote: post #206
nindalf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS licenses it's client library as under the Apache License. ( https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java/blob/master/LICENSE.txt ) Doesn't that mean anyone can build an interoperable service? I can then benefit from other cloud providers implementing the same API. I don't need access to AWS' source code, I wasn't going to deploy a private cloud anyway. All I want is robust competition.

I would guess that it doesn't work out that way. The Apache license has the patent clause, but it doesn't have a comparable "API copyright" clause. Though perhaps another consequence of an Oracle win is that we end up with an Apache3 license.

But the API must be defined in the client library, and that has been released under an open source license.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#675

Post by tutfbhuf »

I think it will be a win-win situation no matter what. If Google loose, we will see an even bigger shift to FOSS, which is obviously a win for the whole developer community. If Oracle loose well then things stay as they are, we are still moving to FOSS but we don't have an Supreme Court accelerator behind that movement, still fine.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#676

Post by cturner »

laurent92 wrote: post #363
rayiner wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means a good is non-rival. Why does that make it more or less “communal?” VI wouldn’t exist without Bill Joy, but his backyard would. Doesn’t that make VI more personal and less communal?

What is communal is the protection provided by the state. When the state has to protect houses, it’s an easy job, very deterministic, and costs are known. But states routinely refuse to protect large sums of money and require that you acquire your own protection. Something which is too costly for the commons or to vague to determine will be excluded from public protection. Protecting ideas is excluded for example, be…

Here, you make an argument is about enforceability that undermines your earlier note about "10 or 20 years". The obvious conclusion of your enforceability argument is that we should not have any form of copyright. That's fine, but it would be a tighter thread if you'd spent a few more minutes to form that argument originally.

The "collective resource" and "communal" concepts above seem to be improvised. If you want to succeed at introducing new concepts, they will need to be well-grounded.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#677

Post by [deleted] »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #288
rayiner wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not even leftist; but even in the capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn’t help guard private companies’ rights in software. If you publish it, the recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to enforce exclusive rights for a few years is already a big extraction of collective resources for private interests. How is software, something of which there is an infinite supply that doesn’t exist…

Millions of people can use VI at once without any direct impact on Bill Joy or his even even noticing it. Millions of people using his back yard at once would be an entirely different matter!

[deleted]

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#678

Post by CJefferson »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #645
thomasahle wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable. > But what is discussed here is not the cookbook but just the table of contents. You probably can't copy that either. That's like Oracle's example of making a new Harry Potter book with all the same chapter titles. I don't know if there are any good examples of APIs one can make based on books..

I mean you very much can copy Chapter 1: Introducing the main character .. Chapter 6: Introducing side character Chapter 7: Arrival at the main story place .. Chapter 17: The final chapter In fact there are whole classifications of literature that identify basic storylines, tropes, structure etc. . The reason you couldn't copy the harry potter chapter titles exactly is because they contain specific titles, e.g. "the…

Picking a random bit of the API, ContainerOrderFocusTraversalPolicy::getImplicitDownCycleTraversal feels to me more like "the boy who lived", rather than "Introducing Side Character" -- I don't think anyone could reasonably claim you would end up at remotely the same thing, unless you were word-for-word copying thousands of lines of API.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#679

Post by meling »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #493
meling wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the recipe analogy, I would say that the API would be the books table of contents. The recipes themselves are the implementation. So the question is, should the book’s toc be copyrightable? That is, is it lawful to write another book with the exact same toc, but with different recipes/implementations...

A ToC doesn't actually work like an API. A ToC cares what order it's in. You can't move Chapter 4 to before Chapter 2 or the implementation has to change. By contrast, the order of functions within a class, or classes within a package, isn't really part of the API -- they're most often in alphabetical order, which is totally mechanistic, and changing the order doesn't change the API. A ToC is also not a rigid formal…

To clarify what I meant. I don’t think the order matters. What would matter is the chapter and section titles... they are the package names and method signatures.

Re: Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google

#680

Post by [deleted] »

grasshopperpurp wrote: post #166
beerandt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"that the conservative majority is predisposed to treat everything as property..." This is misleading at best. For example: RBG, despite her left-leaning reputation, was easily one of, if not the , most pro-copyright and pro-IP justices on the bench. (Relatedly, she also was pretty pro big business, which rarely fits the portrayed narrative.) Not all areas of law, especially at the Supreme Court level, easily trans…

I'm no expert on RBG, but I always pegged her as a Neo-Lib, rather than a Leftist.

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