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White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

arstechnica.com

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Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#91

Post by gnud »

marcosdumay wrote: post #87
gamesbrainiac wrote: post #8

What does this mean for android?

If the White House position is successful, it means Android as open source software is finished. It may go on as proprietary, maybe. It also means SQL, C, C++, POSIX, and more stuff that I can count are forbiden land for open source, and every company making products that include or derivate from them own a non-negotiable unknow amount to some party.

Note: In the US. The rest of us have less crazy copyright laws, at least until we're forced to adopt yours through TTIP.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#92

Post by rodgerd »

oldmanjay wrote: post #62
rodgerd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Con: all the BSDs and Linux are now owned by whoever most recently picked up the POSIX APIs. ReactOS and WINE are now illegal. SQL is the private property of IBM. Pro: I guess if you hate Google because you love Steve Jobs or something it looks like a win.

Quick question - do you feel the need to associate this to Apple because of your deep personal hatred for that company, or for your deep abiding love for Google? Or was it neither, and you just like using rhetorical devices to bolster your weak points?

I'm sure you had a point, but you didn't make it in an intelligible way.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#93

Post by JoshTriplett »

laumars wrote: post #85
JoshTriplett wrote: post #12

On the one hand, this would have serious implications for compatible FOSS reimplementations of proprietary APIs, such as Wine, libc, emulators, etc. On the other hand, this would make it far easier to enforce copyleft licenses like the GPL. I'm one of the people who provided text and examples filed in the EFF's amicus brief against, and on balance I'm not a fan of stricter copyright like this, but it's interesting to…

Emulators are a tricky one because they often require a BIOS file which does break copyright.

No more so than the games, and some emulators have reimplemented BIOSes.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#94

Post by comex »

marcosdumay wrote: post #82
billsix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to hear RMS's stance on the issue, but I'm guessing he would agree with Oracle. http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

That's not the same issue. He's talking about distributing code that is not functional unless linked with a GPL library. Not about distributing code that replaces such GPL library. Oracle is basically saying that you can not write a compatible implementation of Java.

It's partially relevant to the plan Mr. Haible had to get around the GPL by putting the onus on the user to combine readline and CLISP:

> I built a libnoreadline.a that can be linked together with lisp.a, replacing libreadline.a .

> I will reorganize the distribution into 2 independent parts: > * clisp.lzh containing lisp.a and libnoreadline.a, > * readline.tar.Z containing libreadline.a and its source.

> The first one is enough to build a CLISP executable. It contains no GNU parts.

If readline's API were copyrighted and unreimplementable, this would still be infringement. However, this is not actually the argument rms used; rather, he said:

> The FSF position would be that this is still one program, which has only been disguised as two. The reason it is still one program is that the one part clearly shows the intention for incorporation of the other part.

Who knows whether that would hold up in court or not.

Incidentally, these days (well, since 1997 or so?) we have editline, which, rather than being a sort of low-effort dummy implementation like the proposed "libnoreadline", is a full-fledged BSD-licensed readline replacement which provides a readline compatibility API. One possible outcome of this case, in which Google loses on both copyrightability and fair use, would make it arguable (not certain - Java is much larger than readline) that editline is infringing the GPL, which would be amusing.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#95

Post by JoshTriplett »

nickysielicki wrote: post #51
billsix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to hear RMS's stance on the issue, but I'm guessing he would agree with Oracle. http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

Very interesting link, thanks for sharing. From reading that, you can be near certain that RMS would agree.

Or that he would have in 1992. The landscape has changed quite a bit since then.

And the terminology has improved greatly since then; for instance, nowadays the requirement would be described as making CLISP "GPL-compatible", rather than putting it under the GPL.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#96

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mark-r wrote: post #79
runn1ng wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case doesn't touch patent law in the slightest, if I understand it correctly, though. (I am not saying the DoJ opinion is good in any regards whatsoever, to be clear)

No, but it adds copyright trolls to the mix. At least you can count on patents to expire eventually, copyrights are forever in software years.

Patents are forever in software years. Copyrights are longer than that.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#97

Post by laumars »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #93
laumars wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emulators are a tricky one because they often require a BIOS file which does break copyright.

No more so than the games, and some emulators have reimplemented BIOSes.

> No more so than the games

It goes without saying that copying games is illegal. Well, bar a few caveats which seldom apply to people who run emulators.

> some emulators have reimplemented BIOSes

I'm sure some do but many don't - hence my point.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#98

Post by rayiner »

mark-r wrote: post #79
runn1ng wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case doesn't touch patent law in the slightest, if I understand it correctly, though. (I am not saying the DoJ opinion is good in any regards whatsoever, to be clear)

No, but it adds copyright trolls to the mix. At least you can count on patents to expire eventually, copyrights are forever in software years.

The key distinction is, of course, you can't infringe copyright by accident. If you build your platform on someone else's proprietary API, without their permission, then can you really complain when you get sued?

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#99

Post by comex »

elpool2 wrote: post #56
antimatter wrote: post #44

Silly question. Is there any potential for Google to move off of Java (perhaps to Go) for Android development as a result of this?

Seems unlikely, since the article mentions that Google has already stopped using the code in question.

Google stopped using a bit of code from the OpenJDK that they accidentally copied wholesale. The main claim is on the basic concept of reimplementing the Java standard library, which Google can't stop doing in a hurry.

Re: White House Sides with Oracle, Tells Supreme Court APIs Are Copyrightable

#100

Post by josho »

briantmaurer wrote: post #43

Programming is in this odd position somewhere between the structure of math and the creativity of writing. Some things feel as obvious as basic addition, which clearly should not be copyrightable, while other things feel as clever as complex poems, which clearly should be copyrightable. I am not a copyright expert, but in my opinion APIs usually fall closer to the structured math half of programming. ex. GET, POST, P…

When I lived in Java based environments I would have agreed with you. But, having moved on and seen C#, Ruby/Rails, Objective-C, etc. Seeing how differently APIs have been implemented I have an appreciation for the creativity possible in API design.

But, there seems to be a balance, is the API of a single class copyrightable? No, probably not. Is the API of a large system like Java's copyrightable, I really do think so.

Having said that, I disagree with the protections an API suddenly gains once we say I have a monopoly on its use and license. E.g. This verdict likely just made every emulator an act of copyright infringement. Does intel own the API on the x86 instruction API and can lock out AMD?

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