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Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

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Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#761

Post by kemitchell »

bitwize wrote: post #613
victor106 wrote: post #106

I love how the Us supreme court judgements are written using low level terminology that most anyone can understand with little prior knowledge. Some countries use legal and complicated jargon that its hard to follow.

Supreme Court decisions are the next-best thing to black-letter law. It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all. Lower-court rulings have no shortage of legal jargon and terms of art with meanings that conflict with everyday meanings of those same words, because they're just part of the sausage making that is drafting and interpretation of the law. SCOTUS rulings can have these t…

> It is important to clarify what the law has been decided to be, once and for all.

> because again, a SCOTUS ruling is a proclamation to the people, once and for all, of what the law has been settled to be.

That is not how our common-law legal system works. Even setting decisions that the court has later explicitly overruled aside, when the court announces a new rule, that rule is not totally complete and set in stone. Later decisions frequently flesh out, revise, or reinterpret prior decisions.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#762

Post by ncmncm »

lostcolony wrote: post #243
VikingCoder wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, when the code allows an exploit, that's a bug. Thomas is supposed to help us understand the intent of the code - what the Requirement was. Yes, it's better for us if the code reflects the intent perfectly. But to the degree that's not possible, we need someone to Interpret the code. Textualists are trying to ignore the fact that there's a difference between intent and implementation. The Legislature should do a f…

Tangent, but you said something I find really telling, in conjunction with OP's post. Textualism to its proponents is very much like exploiting a system; figuring out the exact rules it defines and finding workarounds. It may not even be to a person's own goals (hence the individual not feeling biased when thinking this way), but is enjoyable in its own right in finding those loopholes (like the meme of the referee a…

Textualism invariably turns out to be a shuck: people who claim to be textualists are textual only when they can find a way to make textualism produce the answer they wanted.

Legal language is slippery enough that this is almost always possible. On the few occasions when it is not possible, we learn the truth. Scalia famously revealed his true colors on occasion.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#763

Post by chmod600 »

From the dissent:

"Instead of creating its own declaring code—as Apple and Microsoft chose to do— Google copied verbatim 11,500 lines of Oracle’s declaring code and arranged that code exactly as Oracle had done."

I didn't read the whole opinion, but what is Google's excuse for this? If there's one way to do it, I don't think copyright should apply. But when there's more than one way, why should copyright not provide some protection? I guess just because it's tiny and contains little expression?

Regardless, it seems like very poor judgement to not do a cleanroom implementation here.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#764

Post by mceachen »

WalterBright wrote: post #760
btilly wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the result is a big relief, I think it's not as decisive as I'm noticing some headlines (and commenters) are claiming. It is even less decisive than you're saying. The fact that the Supreme Court decided not to overturn the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that APIs are copyrightable means that binding precedent on every court except the Supreme is that they are. And for fair use, one of…

Netscape went out of business because their browser crashed far more frequently than Explorer. I've heard all the sob stories, but I was sick of the constant crashing of Netscape, and so tried Explorer. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often.

FWIW, Netscape got bought out by AOL, but not before it spun off Mozilla. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

It may be hard to believe, but the first iteration of Internet Explorer on Macintosh (back on System 8) was __solid__. IE, at least on PowerMacs, was way faster and more reliable than either NCSA Mosaic or Navigator.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#765

Post by gwd »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #698
EgoIncarnate wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ruling doesn't really change anything with respect to CPU instructions. The fair use defense doesn't cover patents. Patents are what are generally what is used by Intel, etc to protect (and license) new CPU instructions and provide protection for novel ideas/inventions for up to 20 years. Copyright generally protects specific expressions/implementations of an idea and last up to 95 years for corporate patents, o…

Say one black-box reimplements x86? Say one makes a "transformative work" with a number of extensions? I fail to see why an ISA is fundamentally different than a standard library.

> I fail to see why an ISA is fundamentally different than a standard library.

As GP said, the difference is whether it's patented. If Sun had patented parts of the API (or algorithms necessary to implement it), then Oracle would have another weapon against Google even after Google was granted a fair-use defense.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#766

Post by kemitchell »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #161

The interesting question is how broad this fair use ruling is. According to the Supreme Court's other fair use cases, fair use is highly fact-specific and therefore case-specific. What kinds of actions and motivations by Google could have led to a determination that the use was not fair? Or is Embrace/Extend/Extinguish as practiced by the big tech companies now always protected by fair use?

That's exactly the question.

We see the majority trying to preserve flexibility in fair use throughout, even going so far as to head off arguments that this decision affects others:

> We do not say that these questions are always relevant to the application of fair use, not even in the world of computer programs. Nor do we say that these questions are the only questions a court might ask.

> The fact that computer programs are primarily functional makes it difficult to apply traditional copyright concepts in that technological world. ... In doing so here, we have not changed the nature of those concepts. We do not overturn or modify our earlier cases involving fair use. ... Rather, we here recognize that applications of a copyright doctrine such as fair use has long proved a cooperative effort of Legislatures and courts, and that Congress, in our view, intended that it so continue.

We see Thomas leading this question in dissent:

> Because the majority's reasoning would undermine copyright protection for so many products long understood to be protected, I understand the majority's holding as a good-for-declaring-code-only precedent.

Fair use is a mishmash of vague, impressionistic factors and a long list of cases from which to argue by analogy. It's not sharp-lines law. It's finger painting.

Which is why lawyers so rarely recommend that people rely on fair use in any really meaningful way, outside areas where there have been a lot of court decisions, or where strong industry norms have evolved between repeat players.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#767

Post by pjmlp »

monocasa wrote: post #708
pjmlp wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cleverly forgetting those from IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, Azul, SAP, Alibaba and everyone else that works on Java?

No, because the core patents behind the features you're asking about are very much in Oracle's possession, as those class library improvements were overwhelmingly written by Sun/Oracle engineers. Those other actors you're talking about absolutely contribute, but not in as nearly a fundamental to the implementation of the library and runtime definitions kind of way.

Are you now asserting that Sun/Oracle has pattents regarding Azul's GC implementation, PTC real time threading and AOT compiler, Aicas hard real time GC, IBM mainframe implementations of their own JVM and WebSphere Real Time VM?

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#768

Post by ncmncm »

jcranmer wrote: post #306
InsaneOstrich wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably owns a bunch of Oracle stock

Justices routinely recuse themselves if they own stock in a company arguing before the court.

Thomas aggressively refuses to recuse himself from cases that other justices consider an obvious conflict of interest.

But they have no authority to enforce their opinion, and Thomas absolutely doesn't care. He didn't become a judge to rule on things he has no opinion on. For him, conflicting interest makes it that much more important to keep his hands in.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#769

Post by kemitchell »

mumblemumble wrote: post #347
lisper wrote: post #311

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 can't have it both ways. If APIs are copyrightable ... then Google's copying was clearly not fair use. 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.copy…

The point of much of Thomas' dissent, as I understood it, was precisely that the court is muddying the rules by taking concerns that properly belong in copyrightability into fair use. They've carved out a subset of copyrights---copyrights on "declaring code"---and made them difficult or impossible to practically enforce. But they did so under one vague fair use factor, not the rules about copyrightability. Because, as Thomas sees it, there's no dignified argument for exclusion or second-class status under the copyrightability rules, most of which come from statute, rather than the courts.

Re: Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]

#770

Post by wtallis »

gigatexal wrote: post #735

I’m super conflicted because I think I side with Oracle here and I never seem to. Java had an established API. It had a license. Google could have licensed it and the end result would have been the same: Java apps on Android. Weren’t there even Google brass worried about this in emails? It seems to me Oracle is due license fees but SCOTUS ruled otherwise and I guess that’s overall better for the industry.

Copyright protection is not an automatic right that you're entitled to for anything you put effort into creating and want to make money off of. There are more specific requirements for what you need to do to secure copyright protection or patent protection, and there are limits on the exclusive rights those get you. "They worked hard on it and want to charge money for it" is not a sound argument.
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