4 ms·
Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial.
by ninkendo 9y ago
Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be.
I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from.
- monocasa 9y agoTriviality isn't the determining factor of what's copyrightable. Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines. Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for software interoperability purposes.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- treis 9y agoIn Sony v. Bleem they used blackbox testing and created their own original code from that. If Google had done the sam they would have been fine.
- monocasa 9y agoBecause of Java's reflection, a black box approach would have given you the same API names that are being discussed here.
- hcknwscommenter 9y agoNot necessarily. You don't have to "look" at the reflection.
- monocasa 9y agoYou do to be API compliant.
- hcknwscommenter 9y agoBleem did not copy. An emulator is not necessarily a copy.
- justonepost 9y agoWhat's reallly non trivial is getting developers to uptake a new APi they are unfamiliar with.
- wvenable 9y agoI think it's important to remember what copyright is meant to protect -- expressions of ideas. You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. You can't copyright medicine. There is a bit of a "intellectual property" slippy slope going on here. Whether or not something is useful or non-trivial is inconsequential.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago> You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. // You could design an engine to have an artistic structure. What you couldn't then do is stop anyone copying the functional parts of the engine and leaving out the purely artistic elements.