821–830 of 965 posts
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Timing, IIRC. Lotus was late to Windows, opening the door for Excel.
Yeah it seems to be 1989 v 1991 based on the wiki but it also sounds like there might be some version differences. 2 years was a long time back then.
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IANAL, but I can imagine something like the following: A. We decide this is fair use based on the small number of LOC used and call it a day B. OR we can decide that APIs are not copyrightable even though they're self-evidently creative works because of the importance of interoperability based on something something related to Borland v. Lotus, a case that we couldn't agree on the last time it came up. Hey folks. Let…
While I agree that APIs should not be copyrightable, the Supreme Court has been criticized for "legislating from the bench". Avoiding the temptation to set bigger and more far-reaching precedents than is strictly necessary for the case at hand avoids giving the impression that the judicial branch is doing the job of the legislative branch.
Well, that's the theory.
In fact, they are doing the job of the legislative branch, they can't stop people from noticing this, and sticking to this approach just means they're doing their job badly.
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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.
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Slow legislation is a feature rather than a bug. Less opportunity for reactionary laws based on emotion or a collective misunderstanding of events that we later regret. It's not a perfect deterrent, obviously, e.g. the Patriot Act
Cipyright law needed reform for like 40 years. Thre is slow, and there is dysfunctional
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Thomas's dissent explicitly points this out. Without diving into "are APIs copyrightable?", the majority are skipping what should have been evaluated first before saying if they were fair-use or not.
Yeah, but Thomas said "The majority can not square it's fundamentally flawed fair-use analysis with a finding that declaring code is copyrightable". Which is obviously false. A fair use analysis can -only- take place if the assumption is the code is copyrightable; if the majority had first decided the code was not copyrightable, fair use is immaterial. Thomas' argument, if followed, would either have led to this same…
Which is obviously false. A fair use analysis can -only- take place if the assumption is the code is copyrightable
You are not disputing Thomas's point; you are agreeing with it. Thomas's point was exactly that, before even embarking on a fair use analysis, the Court should have first decided the question of whether the code was copyrightable. In the absence of a finding that the code was copyrightable, fair use analysis indeed makes no sense.
The "cannot square" part of Thomas's statement is just saying that the reason the majority did not even attempt to decide the question of whether the code was copyrightable was that the reasoning they would have had to use in order to find that it was copyrightable--which they would have had to do to even embark on a fair use analysis--would also have completely invalidated the reasoning they used to decide that Google's use was fair use. In other words, they are simply ignoring a glaring inconsistency in their position.
A decision that the code was not copyrightable in the first place would have been consistent, but the Court did not do that. A decision that the code was copyrightable and Google's use was not fair use would have been consistent, but the Court did not do that either. Instead, Thomas is saying, the Court decided that Google's use was fair use, on grounds that are inconsistent with the code even being copyrightable at all. As much as I hate to side with Oracle, I have to agree with Thomas on this point. The Court should either have ruled explicitly that the code was not copyrightable at all, or should have refused to let Google get away with what is obviously not fair use if the code is copyrightable.
> Thomas' argument, if followed, would either have led to this same decision, or would make the opposite point he was trying to make.
No, Thomas's argument, if followed, would end up with the opposite decision from the one the Court made: that Google's use was not fair use and that the decision below should have been affirmed, not reversed.
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No, not generally. Congress is 545 different people, who definitely don't have a coherent collective intent. The only thing they did collectively was pass the text of the law. So any coherent notion of "congressional intent" has to mean the intent a person reading the text would infer about a hypothetical coherent author . I don't know anything about this particular case, but it is not at all true in general that the…
I think the intent is usually found in statements made by drafters of the legislative language. Intent is not packaged in the raw text of statute.
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
Can't this argument be used to copy the x86 interface and avoid paying license fees to either Intel or ARM for the instruction set?
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…
The HN discussion from 2016 (Jury finds for Google): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781053 From 2018 (Oracle revives matter via appeal): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16688521 Edit: Fixed, had written "Jury finds for Oracle", which was NOT what happened in 2016. Argh.
I'm unfamiliar with the legal system (judicial system?). I had thought that the jury's findings were final. Am I understanding correctly that the case still went to the Supreme Court of the US, and now that court finds in favor of Google. What happens after this, more appeals or is this like a proper static const readonly final?
SCOTUS altered the interpretation of the law, thus removing the legal justification for why the jury found infringement. Since they did not alter any findings of fact (they did not need to) this ruling is legally fine.
A jury can say you definitely did X, that court's judge can say X is illegal, and SCOTUS can then declare X is legal so it doesn't matter anymore if you did X.