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I'd say almost every software engineer should be rooting for Google here. The implications of being able to claim copyright infringement on anyone implementing

I'd say almost every software engineer should be rooting for Google here. The implications of being able to claim copyright infringement on anyone implementing an Application Programming Interface are staggering - it would impact every open source project that tried to interoperate with any company's services, for instance. The world is not going to be better for extending the protections Oracle wants here. Alsup's ruling is sane, shows his clear understanding of coding and the history of Java and how it was licensed out to the world under Sun, and is really very simple to understand: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120531172522459 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120531172522... The appeals court fucked this up, hard. I would like to think Alsup's ruling will be upheld -- groklaw has fantastic quotes from him during the trial. At one point, he himself notes he had coded from the spec some of the functions Oracle complained about and disagreed with Oracle counsel statements. Refreshing from our judicial branch, to say the least.

snagglegaggle 7y ago
Issue exists with instruction sets as well. If Oracle wins everyone who has written a compiler for an instruction set they did not have explicit permission to write one for is in violation.
- gpm 7y ago
  There's probably a better case for compilers being fair use than this (not that this doesn't have a great case). I'd be more concerned about emulators and actual chips. People have been assuming that copyright doesn't apply to APIs for so long that I'm sure there's any number of cases of accidental "copyright infringement as defined by Oracle". I'm just not sure that compilers are a prime example (at least as relating to instruction sets).
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    "Probably". Hah. That just shows the ramifications of Oracle winning this case are fucking insane. We've been operating as if this stuff isn't copyrightable for the last 50 years. You may as well burn the whole industry to the ground if they have their way.
    - leereeves 7y ago
      > You may as well burn the whole industry to the ground if they have their way. At least in the United States. China, on the other hand, will laugh at us as they lay claim to everything American lawyers prevent us from doing.
    - sharpneli 7y ago
      In EU interoperability is a valid reason to break copyright in this manner. It would matter here too though as we do also want to sell software to US. But if one stays out of US markets then things are as they have always been.
      - wbillingsley 7y ago
        The EU has similar cases occur. For example between Lego and Best-Lock over what features of lego are copyrightable versus which are functional (and their competitors' minifigures are also designed to "interoperate" with lego bricks) https://thetmca.com/equitable-estoppel-defense-denies-lego-full-victory-in-copyright-case/ https://thetmca.com/equitable-estoppel-defense-denies-lego-f...
        sharpneli 7y ago
        Yeah. As can be seen in that case they are focusing on things that are mandatory (non copyrightable) and those that are just stylistic choices (copyrightable). API compatibility doesn’t have any stylistic choices in it.
      - hyperman1 7y ago
        Could you de-copyright things in this manner? Say I make locks that only open when they hear music from Disney's lion king. Are you allowed to play that song to open the lock, even without opening it? Does it matter if it was disney or me that made the lock? Silly example of course, can't think of any better. Feel free to substitute your own.
- wyldfire 7y ago
  For anyone to care you'd have to be an adversary of the manufacturer who published the specification. Generally they publish these details in order to encourage people to port OSs and compilers. If a tree infringes in the woods and the silicon manufacturer doesn't hear it...
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    Then you, for example, write a compiler for SPARC in 1990 and distribute it for twenty years, only to see Oracle buy Sun and then decide they'd rather sue you for twenty years of copyright infringement than maintain your cooperation in continuing to produce a compiler for a processor architecture they're planning to discontinue.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  I think emulators and competing CPUs are a more direct analogue.
yarg 7y ago
Seriously people - read the comment before down-voting it. A flood of down-votes coming in in less time than it takes to read what I wrote implies that you aren't even considering the argument I'm presenting. I hate to say it, but I'm with Oracle on this - but not for any reason that I've seen mentioned (so I guess I want neither party to win). (Notwithstanding Sun's internal excitement at Google's use of Java prior to the Oracle acquisition.) There is a justification on the grounds of obviousness for certain method headers to be uncopyrightable. But for inobvious and complicated method headers I do not believe that the restriction should prevent the API from being subject to copyright, but rather to limit the applicability of the copyright for fair use purposes. Specifically I believe the copyrights on such interfaces should not be applicable where interoperability is the justification for the reuse of the interface. Google broke compatibility with Java. I do not believe that Google is using the API under fair use constraints. I'm not sure how the law operates here - but I believe that the precedent set by a Google victory would be more damaging to my position. I'd like to see Google lose, and for someone later - operating with cross-compatibility in mind - to present and win a fair use case for reuse of an API.
- gpm 7y ago
  Let's assume everything you said except the conclusion is right (I disagree with almost all of it, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll put that aside since it's better argued in the fine legal briefs). Why does fair use for interoperability require perfect interoperability? That seems like a totally unreasonable bar. It would mean that making some fraction of an API ridiculously complex to implement a way from stopping anyone from implementing the rest of it.
  - yarg 7y ago
    I'm not talking perfect interoperability - I believe that substitutability should be the bar. Google produced something that is not substitutable in either direction, so what I perceive as the reasonable fair use argument cannot be used here.
    - gpm 7y ago
kpU8efre7r 7y ago
Would this open the door for some schmucko to copyright push, pop, enqueue, dequeue, etc?
- gpm 7y ago
  The better question is would this case mean someone already has the copyright on push, pop, enqueue, dequeue? Someone originally came up with all those APIs, and they (or the people they were working for or otherwise sold it to) would would own any copyright. (The answer is probably no, I'm sure a half decent lawyer would manage to distinguish that from this case since it is so simple).
  - monocasa 7y ago
    This case has the appeals court striking down de minimus claims as well. : /
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      I wonder how those idiot judges on the appeals court would feel if a bunch of programmers with Sharpies ran rampant through their law books, altering the long-established order of things with essentially no knowledge of what they were doing. It's a shame the universe doesn't provide for karmic retribution at this level. Downvote if you like, but there's no other way to describe the absence of de minimis exceptions besides "idiocy." These judges are essentially monkeys in a machine shop.
      - chc 7y ago
        The absence of de minimis exceptions is not that important because API copyrights are a terrible idea all on their own.
      - jimnotgym 7y ago
        Perhaps they are not idiots, they are just trying to apply laws written for books and music to software. That is not their fault, they don't get to make laws, only interpret them. I think this is another case where the law makers have been rather slow to keep up. Copyright is not really working in this era.
pron 7y ago
> it would impact every open source project that tried to interoperate with any company's services, for instance. This is categorically untrue. The discussion is not about anything called "API" but only certain kinds of APIs (code APIs, as opposed to protocols like REST "APIs"), and even then there is fair use.
- monocasa 7y ago
  What about the legal arguments made makes a distinction between "code" and "REST" APIs like you're doing? I've been reading the decisions and haven't seen anything like that.
  - pron 7y ago
    The legal arguments in any case pertain only to that case, but it is a necessary condition for a work to be covered by copyright is that it "fixed in a tangible medium of expression"[1], i.e. that there is some fixed text (or a picture, or an audio or video recording) that is the work (although once it exists, derivatives are also protected). This is true for a code API, but not for a protocol. [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of_expression https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...
    - gpm 7y ago
      How is a rest api document any less tangible than a source code document?
      - pron 7y ago
        What piece of text that is the REST protocol?
        gpm 7y ago
        Here is a simple REST protocol: Send a GET request to some_website.com/some_protocol to get back a jpg of a cat I wrote it down, and thus it was "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". As I understand that requirement of the law that is all that is required. If I just told you that verbally, and we did not write it down, record what I was saying via a mic, or anything else, then it would not be fixed. No one does protocols like that though.
lettergram 7y ago
On the contrary, I’m actually not 100% sure who’s side I should be in on... Look at it this way, if oracle loses, then what’s the implications of the software licenses in general. The whole point is that they were protected by copyright. If that’s shot down, then what’s at stake? Not saying I side one way or the other, simply that I don’t think it’s clear. Depending how the court rules one way or the other could have a huge impact (as you pointed out).
- wtallis 7y ago
  > Look at it this way, if oracle loses, then what’s the implications of the software licenses in general. The whole point is that they were protected by copyright. If that’s shot down, then what’s at stake? An Oracle loss would not damage the legal framework that the software industry has been operating under. Oracle's loss would only confirm the non-existence of a new class of copyright that Oracle is trying to invent (one that appears to be patent protections with copyright duration, enforced in part by trademarks). An Oracle loss would not undermine the legal foundations of existing copyrights on code that implements an API.
- gpm 7y ago
  Software licenses still work exactly the way we've always thought they do if the federal circuits ruling is shot down. Copyright still works exactly the way we've always thought it done. No one has ever thought that you could stop people from copying APIs. If they did all sorts of things like Linux (hi Unix), Wine, Windows Subsystem For Linux, AMD x86 CPUs (ok, Intel might have licensed them to avoid anti trust issues), Intel x64 CPUs, and so on would not exist.
  - pgrulich 7y ago
    Also Intel licensed x64 from AMD...
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Those were patent licenses, not copyright.
choppaface 7y ago
Rooting for fair use? Yes. Rooting for a big company spending big money to pay for the precedent? Sure. Rooting for Google itself, who is simply pursuing the most effective solution for their own business (and brand)? That’s something entirely different.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  If APIs aren't copyrightable, then that solution is open to you as well. Turns out, inventing a whole language every time you need to write a new library is an enormous pain in the ass.
- choppaface 7y ago
  Not surprisingly but this comment / position gets downvoted and yet plenty of approval for "Also, Oracle just sucks in general. Larry Ellison is a notorious jerk and philanderer...." (I'm all for crapping on Oracle, I guess the lesson is to weave that into any post on this topic).
- danShumway 7y ago
  I don't love everything about Google, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Oracle wins, that precedent will hurt everyone in the software industry, including me. So yeah, I'm rooting for Google and I have no hesitation or shame rooting for Google -- because for better or worse, Google is the company fighting for my rights in this case, and I want to win.
ecopoesis 7y ago
But this case isn’t about consuming or interacting with an API, it’s about implementing an API. So less writing a compiler targeting a CPU instruction set and more building a CPU based on someone else’s instruction set. I’ve always found it strange that other programmers are so dismissive of APIs as copyrightable work. They’re they hard part! Building APIs requires creativity and careful thought. If you support the idea that APIs can’t be copyrighted, and ignoring the evilness of Oracle and Google, what’s your reasoning?
- wtallis 7y ago
  > If you support the idea that APIs can’t be copyrighted, and ignoring the evilness of Oracle and Google, what’s your reasoning? The reasoning is quite simple and obvious: We have long-standing statutory and case law that defines specifically what is or isn't eligible for copyright protection, or patents, or trademarks. Your gut feelings about whether your API deserves protection because of how much effort you put into it are completely irrelevant to that legal framework.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Seems like circular reasoning to say that the things that can be copyrighted are the things that we have agreed can be copyrighted. Seems like if the courts decide that APIs are copyrightable then you would be fine with it since it would be part of that case law. There was a time when software didn’t have copyright protection. Somebody had to make the first move.
    - wtallis 7y ago
      It's not circular reasoning. The flow is clear: the Constitution gives Congress the power to make copyright law, Congress passed laws doing so, and the courts work out the details at the margins for stuff Congress didn't make explicit. Software is very much explicitly mentioned by the copyright laws that have been passed by Congress, so there's no reasonable doubt about the legal foundation there. API copyright isn't explicitly supported by statutory law, so for the courts to affirm API copyright on their own, they need to provide a convincing derivation of its existence as implicitly covered by existing statute. I doubt they can do so, and they obviously cannot do so without overturning a lot of previous precedent. And all of the above is about the legal, technical questions about what the law is. The public policy question of what the law should be is a different matter entirely, and opinions about that generally should be addressed to Congress, not the Supreme Court.
abvdasker 7y ago
Also, Oracle just sucks in general. Larry Ellison is a notorious jerk and philanderer. Oracle's entire business is based on the success of one expensive database product from the 70s, which is mostly still in use due to decades-long vendor lock-in of stagnant enterprise giants like SAP, IBM, most banks and a good chunk of the DoD.
- nullspace 7y ago
  That's a good thing right? I mean, I'm not implying that Google is on the opposite side of this, but still, I'd wager most people on HN would love to be a Larry Ellison (riches aside), where you get start a product today, and still be relevant with that same product 40 years from now. I honestly don't get the Oracle hate from HN people, even if I do understand it from the Slashdot folks.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    I previously worked at Oracle for years in the dotcom era and I can tell you the company culture was horrid. It was completely sales driven, sales people would often lie to customers and promise the product had a feature which it either didn’t have or was not well supported and then have to fly in expensive consultants afterwards to fix the resulting shitshow. I accompanied Sales Account managers with fellow female engineers to client meeting where they, and I’m not kidding, discussed which strip clubs they would go to after the meetings. If Apple is a designer culture, and Google is an engineer culture, then I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture.
    - mrep 7y ago
      > I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture. Isn't Oracle a legal driven company [0] :) [0]: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > It was completely sales driven Another perspective is that Oracle is one of just a few tech companies left that has a proper dedicated research lab that does long-term research without asking about profit. I worked on my research project there for six years and nobody once asked me how we were going to make money from it, let alone talked about sales. That’s pretty special these days. Oracle even paid me a senior developer salary while I worked on my PhD. Hard to say that’s ‘completely sales driven!’
psaux 7y ago
Did you read the content? Google did copy the private API’s. I am a legacy Java person and it is blatant theft. Not rooting for Oracle in any sense, but it was a total copy.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I think APIs cannot be patented. Not sure what is the situation with Google vs Oracle. https://bbvaopen4u.com/en/actualidad/patents-apis-or-copyright-find-your-way-through-regulations https://bbvaopen4u.com/en/actualidad/patents-apis-or-copyrig...
  - alok-g 7y ago
    Are you mixing copyrights with patents?
innagadadavida 7y ago
Google screwed over Sun Microsystems. Let’s not forget that all this started before Oracle. The original Java license mandates that mobile usage is differently licensed. Google basically writhed their own JVM just to bypass this - not for any other technical reasons.
- kelnos 7y ago
  If you don't want to enter into a particular licensing agreement, and a clean room reimplementation lets you do that legally, what's wrong with that?
  - wbillingsley 7y ago
    > and a clean room reimplementation lets you do that legally You're begging the question. This Supreme Court fight is over whether a clean room reimplementation lets them do that legally.
    - eitally 7y ago
      I don't think that's "begging the question". Google's corporate counsel determined current law allows for clean room reimplementation, so that's what they did. This was subsequently challenged, and that's where we are now. This isn't a case of Natural Law where the decision is commonsensical -- it's up to the courts to make an evaluation based on other established caselaw (in this case copyright), and there's certainly room for interpretation.
    - wtallis 7y ago
      This is a fight over whether Oracle can get existing Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent overturned to make clean room reimplementation no longer legal.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      I understand that. I was specifically replying to the assertion that "Google screwed over Sun Microsystems". No, they did not. They decided on a path that they believed was legally defensible and would allow them to do their own thing with Java at lower cost. It might turn out that they're wrong, but no one tried to screw over anyone. It was purely an economic decision. And if it turns out that Google loses this case, then all sorts of things that we take for granted for interoperability (like WINE, and, before the MS acquisition, Mono) are actually copyright infringement and shouldn't exist. I don't think we can claim with a straight face that WINE or Mono were created with malice intended toward MS, so we should give Google the same courtesy.
MrGman 7y ago
Can you explain why you think "the appeals court fucked this up, hard."? Isn't the way the law is written the real root cause here? Judges and courts don't write laws... Basic questions pop up (hey look "pop" that's an API) in my mind like: is copyright on code a thing that should exist?
- gpm 7y ago
  > Can you explain why you think "the appeals court fucked this up, hard."? This reply I already wrote serves as a good answer to that question (though I'm not the person you asked): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550702 > Isn't the way the law is written the real root cause here? Judges and courts don't write laws... This is a complicated question, but I would argue that the answer is no. Congress trying to anticipate every corner case ahead of time would be a nightmare, so instead the courts exist to take general laws and apply them to specific cases. Even if congress tried to write a law with no unspecified edge cases, they would fail, because any law they pass has to be within the powers granted to them by the constitution, and those powers are vague. The relevant power here is literally "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". That's it, one sentence, it's vague and there is no fixing it. If congress tries to legislate something that falls a bit outside of it, or that violates any of the various rights and freedoms specified in equally vague sentences, the law, at least as applied such that is violates the constitution, doesn't exist. It's also not quite true that judges and courts don't write law in our common law system. They do, that's what the "common" part is about. Statutory law takes precedence, common law fills in the gaps. Here's an example of a case where the Texas Supreme Court directly addresses that they are creating new exceptions to the law, and that they can do so because the relevant law in the first place was invented by the courts: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59148e86add7b04934555a19 https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59148e86add7b04934555a...
tinco 7y ago
This guy Peter Vessenes is holding thousands of peoples' trading accounts hostage in a frivolous lawsuit against a now-defunct exchange. Multiple people have committed suicide because their life savings are locked up in this lawsuit. All because Vessenes here thinks he should be awarded half a billion dollars for making a half hearted attempt at opening a US based branch of it. It makes me sick just to see your name on here. You should be ashamed of yourself, at least own it and make your comments under a pseudonym. Or do you actually feel you are somehow justified in robbing us?
- sammorrowdrums 7y ago
  I know people can do their own research but if you're posting about someone directly like this, maybe share a link so those of us who don't know can easily find out more about this case.
  - sammorrowdrums 7y ago
    Taking my own advice, I found this: https://bitcoinomics.net/if-youre-going-to-get-into-bitcoin-avoid-doing-business-with-this-man/ https://bitcoinomics.net/if-youre-going-to-get-into-bitcoin-... No idea of the quality of Bitcoinomics as a source though.
    - tinco 7y ago
      Here's an article that was accurate at the time: https://news.bitcoin.com/mt-gox-restitution-process-frozen-due-to-one-mans-16b-claim/ https://news.bitcoin.com/mt-gox-restitution-process-frozen-d... I'm part of the lawsuit that he's blocking, so you could take my word for it that that news article is correct. He has since lowered the claim amount to half a billion, which is still an insane amount that's too large for letting the bankruptcy just proceed.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >You should be ashamed of yourself, at least own it and make your comments under a pseudonym I've found that this community will turn a blind eye to fraud and corruption, as long as it's done in the name of "disruption" and you're a "tech company".
pjmlp 7y ago
The current state of Java support on Android proves that Google has achieved their own variant of J++, forcing Java library authors to write Android Java, if they wish to support the platform. "James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be&t=57m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be... Google should face the same penalty as Microsoft did, plain and simple.
- greggman2 7y ago
  why does matter? it's a serious question. it sounds like if they just renamed it Jawa instead of Java your complaint would disappear?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Only if they rewrite the world in Jawa and stop advertising compatibility with the Java eco-system, then they can use Jawa, Dart, Kotlin/Native, whatever they fell like.
    - greggman2 7y ago
      I don't really get your argument. gcc has lots of non-standard extensions. Should gcc not be able to call itself a c++ compiler?
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Android Java is a subset of cherry picked features of Java and its standard library, with support varying across Android version. GCC is an ISO C++ and ISO C compliant compiler, plus a set of language extensions. Any ISO C++ or ISO C code will compile under GCC. Not every piece of standard compliant Java code will compile under Android Java. Not only this produces a burden writting portable Java libraries, it creates a false perception to many developers that learned Java via Android and assume Android Java == Java. The later point is usually used by Google when they sell how Kotlin fares against Java, because naturally if they would compare it against a proper up to date version, some of the plus points wouldn't uphold.
rasz 7y ago
IBM should be warming up their lawyers to sue Oracle for SQL.
- Joeri 7y ago
  Nah, oracle’s sql is so different there’s hardly any overlap with standard sql.
stopadvertising 7y ago
Why does it matter? The API is as dead as the telegraph, everyone is just building garden walls higher instead. I worked on and with lots of APIs back in the day. They are all gone. All of them. Eliminated for business reasons. The internet has become a tool for carving out fiefdoms of engagement to be monetized, it's not about connecting people or systems anymore.
snarf21 7y ago
Exactly this. Oracle is nothing but a common patent troll here. They bought SUN for one and only one purpose..... to sue Google. I know someone involved in the preliminary investigations into this. It is not a secret at all. It would be awesome if Google would take the Cloudflare approach and try to crowdsource prior art for all of Oracle's patents. (Best case, 1M software patents go away on all sides) Hopefully as things continue to the cloud with private options and their loss of the JEDI contract puts them right out of business.
- pacala 7y ago
  Google had the option to buy SUN, too.
  - dudus 7y ago
    Why would they buy it if they weren't interested in the prospect of suing other people with it? In hindsight it would be a great defensive buy,but there's no way they could foresee this shit storm caused by this absurd lawsuit.
    - pacala 7y ago
      For the rights to the proprietary language around which they built their flagship mobile platform.
pacala 7y ago
Not copyrightable APIs is a fairly dangerous precedent. 1. Good APIs are hard. 2. Under Alsup's ruling, good luck competing with AWS sales org when they decide to offer your own APIs as a service. 3. Nothing prevents Google from inventing their own APIs, and licensing them under whatever terms they like. As of Google vs. Oracle, it's pretty clear that Google appropriated Java to benefit from its penetration in the market place, instead of putting in the hard work to build their own. Apple has built their own ecosystem, ObjectiveC/Cocoa/Swift/SwiftUI. Microsoft has built their own ecosystem, C#/DotNet, or adopted and contributed to open standards, HTML5/Javascript/Typescript. Heck, even HP has built WebOS around open standards.
- orangecat 7y ago
  good luck competing with AWS sales org when they decide to offer your own APIs as a service If the only advantage you have over AWS is that developers would have to change the function names in their code, you're dead anyway. And copyrightable APIs mean that you can't offer an API compatible with AWS as a way to get developers to try your platform in the first place.
LeftHandPath 7y ago
Honestly, they need to put it into layman's terms. The exposed function calls of an API are meant to be implementation-blind. Let's say car-company A builds the first ever car that's operated with a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch pedal, and shifter. Then, Company B comes along and - both to create a complete control system for the car AND to potentially benefit consumers who are already familiar with those controls - also uses a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch pedal, and shifter. The steering column and its inner workings are completely different. The gas pedal activates a V8 combustion engine instead of an I4. The clutch pedal triggers a dual clutch for faster shifting between gears. The brake pedal activates disc brakes instead of drum-brakes. The appeals court is, in effect, saying that Company B has violated copyright because, when faced with the same problem, they came up with a solution that looks very similar on the outside. They turn a blind eye - willingly or unwillingly - to all the new engineering that went on to improve the product and create a new expression of an automobile.
smokinman 7y ago
Yeah, fancy a scumbag using the legal system to hold people to ransom with their worthless and bogus claim. Sounds a bit like what Peter Vessenes is doing to 25,000 creditors of MtGox, even after being offered an incredibly generous $10 million dollar kiss off.

snagglegaggle 7y ago

Issue exists with instruction sets as well. If Oracle wins everyone who has written a compiler for an instruction set they did not have explicit permission to write one for is in violation.

gpm 7y ago
There's probably a better case for compilers being fair use than this (not that this doesn't have a great case). I'd be more concerned about emulators and actual chips. People have been assuming that copyright doesn't apply to APIs for so long that I'm sure there's any number of cases of accidental "copyright infringement as defined by Oracle". I'm just not sure that compilers are a prime example (at least as relating to instruction sets).
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  "Probably". Hah. That just shows the ramifications of Oracle winning this case are fucking insane. We've been operating as if this stuff isn't copyrightable for the last 50 years. You may as well burn the whole industry to the ground if they have their way.
  - leereeves 7y ago
    > You may as well burn the whole industry to the ground if they have their way. At least in the United States. China, on the other hand, will laugh at us as they lay claim to everything American lawyers prevent us from doing.
  - sharpneli 7y ago
    In EU interoperability is a valid reason to break copyright in this manner. It would matter here too though as we do also want to sell software to US. But if one stays out of US markets then things are as they have always been.
    - wbillingsley 7y ago
      The EU has similar cases occur. For example between Lego and Best-Lock over what features of lego are copyrightable versus which are functional (and their competitors' minifigures are also designed to "interoperate" with lego bricks) https://thetmca.com/equitable-estoppel-defense-denies-lego-full-victory-in-copyright-case/ https://thetmca.com/equitable-estoppel-defense-denies-lego-f...
      - sharpneli 7y ago
        Yeah. As can be seen in that case they are focusing on things that are mandatory (non copyrightable) and those that are just stylistic choices (copyrightable). API compatibility doesn’t have any stylistic choices in it.
    - hyperman1 7y ago
      Could you de-copyright things in this manner? Say I make locks that only open when they hear music from Disney's lion king. Are you allowed to play that song to open the lock, even without opening it? Does it matter if it was disney or me that made the lock? Silly example of course, can't think of any better. Feel free to substitute your own.
wyldfire 7y ago
For anyone to care you'd have to be an adversary of the manufacturer who published the specification. Generally they publish these details in order to encourage people to port OSs and compilers. If a tree infringes in the woods and the silicon manufacturer doesn't hear it...
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  Then you, for example, write a compiler for SPARC in 1990 and distribute it for twenty years, only to see Oracle buy Sun and then decide they'd rather sue you for twenty years of copyright infringement than maintain your cooperation in continuing to produce a compiler for a processor architecture they're planning to discontinue.
TimTheTinker 7y ago
I think emulators and competing CPUs are a more direct analogue.

yarg 7y ago

Seriously people - read the comment before down-voting it. A flood of down-votes coming in in less time than it takes to read what I wrote implies that you aren't even considering the argument I'm presenting. I hate to say it, but I'm with Oracle on this - but not for any reason that I've seen mentioned (so I guess I want neither party to win). (Notwithstanding Sun's internal excitement at Google's use of Java prior to the Oracle acquisition.) There is a justification on the grounds of obviousness for certain method headers to be uncopyrightable. But for inobvious and complicated method headers I do not believe that the restriction should prevent the API from being subject to copyright, but rather to limit the applicability of the copyright for fair use purposes. Specifically I believe the copyrights on such interfaces should not be applicable where interoperability is the justification for the reuse of the interface. Google broke compatibility with Java. I do not believe that Google is using the API under fair use constraints. I'm not sure how the law operates here - but I believe that the precedent set by a Google victory would be more damaging to my position. I'd like to see Google lose, and for someone later - operating with cross-compatibility in mind - to present and win a fair use case for reuse of an API.

gpm 7y ago
Let's assume everything you said except the conclusion is right (I disagree with almost all of it, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll put that aside since it's better argued in the fine legal briefs). Why does fair use for interoperability require perfect interoperability? That seems like a totally unreasonable bar. It would mean that making some fraction of an API ridiculously complex to implement a way from stopping anyone from implementing the rest of it.
- yarg 7y ago
  I'm not talking perfect interoperability - I believe that substitutability should be the bar. Google produced something that is not substitutable in either direction, so what I perceive as the reasonable fair use argument cannot be used here.
  - gpm 7y ago

kpU8efre7r 7y ago

Would this open the door for some schmucko to copyright push, pop, enqueue, dequeue, etc?

gpm 7y ago
The better question is would this case mean someone already has the copyright on push, pop, enqueue, dequeue? Someone originally came up with all those APIs, and they (or the people they were working for or otherwise sold it to) would would own any copyright. (The answer is probably no, I'm sure a half decent lawyer would manage to distinguish that from this case since it is so simple).
- monocasa 7y ago
  This case has the appeals court striking down de minimus claims as well. : /
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    I wonder how those idiot judges on the appeals court would feel if a bunch of programmers with Sharpies ran rampant through their law books, altering the long-established order of things with essentially no knowledge of what they were doing. It's a shame the universe doesn't provide for karmic retribution at this level. Downvote if you like, but there's no other way to describe the absence of de minimis exceptions besides "idiocy." These judges are essentially monkeys in a machine shop.
    - chc 7y ago
      The absence of de minimis exceptions is not that important because API copyrights are a terrible idea all on their own.
    - jimnotgym 7y ago
      Perhaps they are not idiots, they are just trying to apply laws written for books and music to software. That is not their fault, they don't get to make laws, only interpret them. I think this is another case where the law makers have been rather slow to keep up. Copyright is not really working in this era.

pron 7y ago

> it would impact every open source project that tried to interoperate with any company's services, for instance. This is categorically untrue. The discussion is not about anything called "API" but only certain kinds of APIs (code APIs, as opposed to protocols like REST "APIs"), and even then there is fair use.

monocasa 7y ago
What about the legal arguments made makes a distinction between "code" and "REST" APIs like you're doing? I've been reading the decisions and haven't seen anything like that.
- pron 7y ago
  The legal arguments in any case pertain only to that case, but it is a necessary condition for a work to be covered by copyright is that it "fixed in a tangible medium of expression"[1], i.e. that there is some fixed text (or a picture, or an audio or video recording) that is the work (although once it exists, derivatives are also protected). This is true for a code API, but not for a protocol. [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_of_expression https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fixed_in_a_tangible_medium_o...
  - gpm 7y ago
    How is a rest api document any less tangible than a source code document?
    - pron 7y ago
      What piece of text that is the REST protocol?
      - gpm 7y ago
        Here is a simple REST protocol: Send a GET request to some_website.com/some_protocol to get back a jpg of a cat I wrote it down, and thus it was "fixed in a tangible medium of expression". As I understand that requirement of the law that is all that is required. If I just told you that verbally, and we did not write it down, record what I was saying via a mic, or anything else, then it would not be fixed. No one does protocols like that though.

lettergram 7y ago

On the contrary, I’m actually not 100% sure who’s side I should be in on... Look at it this way, if oracle loses, then what’s the implications of the software licenses in general. The whole point is that they were protected by copyright. If that’s shot down, then what’s at stake? Not saying I side one way or the other, simply that I don’t think it’s clear. Depending how the court rules one way or the other could have a huge impact (as you pointed out).

wtallis 7y ago
> Look at it this way, if oracle loses, then what’s the implications of the software licenses in general. The whole point is that they were protected by copyright. If that’s shot down, then what’s at stake? An Oracle loss would not damage the legal framework that the software industry has been operating under. Oracle's loss would only confirm the non-existence of a new class of copyright that Oracle is trying to invent (one that appears to be patent protections with copyright duration, enforced in part by trademarks). An Oracle loss would not undermine the legal foundations of existing copyrights on code that implements an API.
gpm 7y ago
Software licenses still work exactly the way we've always thought they do if the federal circuits ruling is shot down. Copyright still works exactly the way we've always thought it done. No one has ever thought that you could stop people from copying APIs. If they did all sorts of things like Linux (hi Unix), Wine, Windows Subsystem For Linux, AMD x86 CPUs (ok, Intel might have licensed them to avoid anti trust issues), Intel x64 CPUs, and so on would not exist.
- pgrulich 7y ago
  Also Intel licensed x64 from AMD...
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Those were patent licenses, not copyright.

choppaface 7y ago

Rooting for fair use? Yes. Rooting for a big company spending big money to pay for the precedent? Sure. Rooting for Google itself, who is simply pursuing the most effective solution for their own business (and brand)? That’s something entirely different.

hannasanarion 7y ago
If APIs aren't copyrightable, then that solution is open to you as well. Turns out, inventing a whole language every time you need to write a new library is an enormous pain in the ass.
choppaface 7y ago
Not surprisingly but this comment / position gets downvoted and yet plenty of approval for "Also, Oracle just sucks in general. Larry Ellison is a notorious jerk and philanderer...." (I'm all for crapping on Oracle, I guess the lesson is to weave that into any post on this topic).
danShumway 7y ago
I don't love everything about Google, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Oracle wins, that precedent will hurt everyone in the software industry, including me. So yeah, I'm rooting for Google and I have no hesitation or shame rooting for Google -- because for better or worse, Google is the company fighting for my rights in this case, and I want to win.

ecopoesis 7y ago

But this case isn’t about consuming or interacting with an API, it’s about implementing an API. So less writing a compiler targeting a CPU instruction set and more building a CPU based on someone else’s instruction set. I’ve always found it strange that other programmers are so dismissive of APIs as copyrightable work. They’re they hard part! Building APIs requires creativity and careful thought. If you support the idea that APIs can’t be copyrighted, and ignoring the evilness of Oracle and Google, what’s your reasoning?

wtallis 7y ago
> If you support the idea that APIs can’t be copyrighted, and ignoring the evilness of Oracle and Google, what’s your reasoning? The reasoning is quite simple and obvious: We have long-standing statutory and case law that defines specifically what is or isn't eligible for copyright protection, or patents, or trademarks. Your gut feelings about whether your API deserves protection because of how much effort you put into it are completely irrelevant to that legal framework.
- Spivak 7y ago
  Seems like circular reasoning to say that the things that can be copyrighted are the things that we have agreed can be copyrighted. Seems like if the courts decide that APIs are copyrightable then you would be fine with it since it would be part of that case law. There was a time when software didn’t have copyright protection. Somebody had to make the first move.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    It's not circular reasoning. The flow is clear: the Constitution gives Congress the power to make copyright law, Congress passed laws doing so, and the courts work out the details at the margins for stuff Congress didn't make explicit. Software is very much explicitly mentioned by the copyright laws that have been passed by Congress, so there's no reasonable doubt about the legal foundation there. API copyright isn't explicitly supported by statutory law, so for the courts to affirm API copyright on their own, they need to provide a convincing derivation of its existence as implicitly covered by existing statute. I doubt they can do so, and they obviously cannot do so without overturning a lot of previous precedent. And all of the above is about the legal, technical questions about what the law is. The public policy question of what the law should be is a different matter entirely, and opinions about that generally should be addressed to Congress, not the Supreme Court.

abvdasker 7y ago

Also, Oracle just sucks in general. Larry Ellison is a notorious jerk and philanderer. Oracle's entire business is based on the success of one expensive database product from the 70s, which is mostly still in use due to decades-long vendor lock-in of stagnant enterprise giants like SAP, IBM, most banks and a good chunk of the DoD.

nullspace 7y ago
That's a good thing right? I mean, I'm not implying that Google is on the opposite side of this, but still, I'd wager most people on HN would love to be a Larry Ellison (riches aside), where you get start a product today, and still be relevant with that same product 40 years from now. I honestly don't get the Oracle hate from HN people, even if I do understand it from the Slashdot folks.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  I previously worked at Oracle for years in the dotcom era and I can tell you the company culture was horrid. It was completely sales driven, sales people would often lie to customers and promise the product had a feature which it either didn’t have or was not well supported and then have to fly in expensive consultants afterwards to fix the resulting shitshow. I accompanied Sales Account managers with fellow female engineers to client meeting where they, and I’m not kidding, discussed which strip clubs they would go to after the meetings. If Apple is a designer culture, and Google is an engineer culture, then I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture.
  - mrep 7y ago
    > I‘d say Oracle is driven by a hierarchy of sales culture. Isn't Oracle a legal driven company [0] :) [0]: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > It was completely sales driven Another perspective is that Oracle is one of just a few tech companies left that has a proper dedicated research lab that does long-term research without asking about profit. I worked on my research project there for six years and nobody once asked me how we were going to make money from it, let alone talked about sales. That’s pretty special these days. Oracle even paid me a senior developer salary while I worked on my PhD. Hard to say that’s ‘completely sales driven!’

psaux 7y ago

Did you read the content? Google did copy the private API’s. I am a legacy Java person and it is blatant theft. Not rooting for Oracle in any sense, but it was a total copy.

StreamBright 7y ago
I think APIs cannot be patented. Not sure what is the situation with Google vs Oracle. https://bbvaopen4u.com/en/actualidad/patents-apis-or-copyright-find-your-way-through-regulations https://bbvaopen4u.com/en/actualidad/patents-apis-or-copyrig...
- alok-g 7y ago
  Are you mixing copyrights with patents?

innagadadavida 7y ago

Google screwed over Sun Microsystems. Let’s not forget that all this started before Oracle. The original Java license mandates that mobile usage is differently licensed. Google basically writhed their own JVM just to bypass this - not for any other technical reasons.

kelnos 7y ago
If you don't want to enter into a particular licensing agreement, and a clean room reimplementation lets you do that legally, what's wrong with that?
- wbillingsley 7y ago
  > and a clean room reimplementation lets you do that legally You're begging the question. This Supreme Court fight is over whether a clean room reimplementation lets them do that legally.
  - eitally 7y ago
    I don't think that's "begging the question". Google's corporate counsel determined current law allows for clean room reimplementation, so that's what they did. This was subsequently challenged, and that's where we are now. This isn't a case of Natural Law where the decision is commonsensical -- it's up to the courts to make an evaluation based on other established caselaw (in this case copyright), and there's certainly room for interpretation.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    This is a fight over whether Oracle can get existing Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent overturned to make clean room reimplementation no longer legal.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    I understand that. I was specifically replying to the assertion that "Google screwed over Sun Microsystems". No, they did not. They decided on a path that they believed was legally defensible and would allow them to do their own thing with Java at lower cost. It might turn out that they're wrong, but no one tried to screw over anyone. It was purely an economic decision. And if it turns out that Google loses this case, then all sorts of things that we take for granted for interoperability (like WINE, and, before the MS acquisition, Mono) are actually copyright infringement and shouldn't exist. I don't think we can claim with a straight face that WINE or Mono were created with malice intended toward MS, so we should give Google the same courtesy.

MrGman 7y ago

Can you explain why you think "the appeals court fucked this up, hard."? Isn't the way the law is written the real root cause here? Judges and courts don't write laws... Basic questions pop up (hey look "pop" that's an API) in my mind like: is copyright on code a thing that should exist?

gpm 7y ago
> Can you explain why you think "the appeals court fucked this up, hard."? This reply I already wrote serves as a good answer to that question (though I'm not the person you asked): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550702 > Isn't the way the law is written the real root cause here? Judges and courts don't write laws... This is a complicated question, but I would argue that the answer is no. Congress trying to anticipate every corner case ahead of time would be a nightmare, so instead the courts exist to take general laws and apply them to specific cases. Even if congress tried to write a law with no unspecified edge cases, they would fail, because any law they pass has to be within the powers granted to them by the constitution, and those powers are vague. The relevant power here is literally "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". That's it, one sentence, it's vague and there is no fixing it. If congress tries to legislate something that falls a bit outside of it, or that violates any of the various rights and freedoms specified in equally vague sentences, the law, at least as applied such that is violates the constitution, doesn't exist. It's also not quite true that judges and courts don't write law in our common law system. They do, that's what the "common" part is about. Statutory law takes precedence, common law fills in the gaps. Here's an example of a case where the Texas Supreme Court directly addresses that they are creating new exceptions to the law, and that they can do so because the relevant law in the first place was invented by the courts: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59148e86add7b04934555a19 https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/59148e86add7b04934555a...

tinco 7y ago

This guy Peter Vessenes is holding thousands of peoples' trading accounts hostage in a frivolous lawsuit against a now-defunct exchange. Multiple people have committed suicide because their life savings are locked up in this lawsuit. All because Vessenes here thinks he should be awarded half a billion dollars for making a half hearted attempt at opening a US based branch of it. It makes me sick just to see your name on here. You should be ashamed of yourself, at least own it and make your comments under a pseudonym. Or do you actually feel you are somehow justified in robbing us?

sammorrowdrums 7y ago
I know people can do their own research but if you're posting about someone directly like this, maybe share a link so those of us who don't know can easily find out more about this case.
- sammorrowdrums 7y ago
  Taking my own advice, I found this: https://bitcoinomics.net/if-youre-going-to-get-into-bitcoin-avoid-doing-business-with-this-man/ https://bitcoinomics.net/if-youre-going-to-get-into-bitcoin-... No idea of the quality of Bitcoinomics as a source though.
  - tinco 7y ago
    Here's an article that was accurate at the time: https://news.bitcoin.com/mt-gox-restitution-process-frozen-due-to-one-mans-16b-claim/ https://news.bitcoin.com/mt-gox-restitution-process-frozen-d... I'm part of the lawsuit that he's blocking, so you could take my word for it that that news article is correct. He has since lowered the claim amount to half a billion, which is still an insane amount that's too large for letting the bankruptcy just proceed.
aguyfromnb 7y ago
>You should be ashamed of yourself, at least own it and make your comments under a pseudonym I've found that this community will turn a blind eye to fraud and corruption, as long as it's done in the name of "disruption" and you're a "tech company".

pjmlp 7y ago

The current state of Java support on Android proves that Google has achieved their own variant of J++, forcing Java library authors to write Android Java, if they wish to support the platform. "James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be&t=57m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be... Google should face the same penalty as Microsoft did, plain and simple.

greggman2 7y ago
why does matter? it's a serious question. it sounds like if they just renamed it Jawa instead of Java your complaint would disappear?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Only if they rewrite the world in Jawa and stop advertising compatibility with the Java eco-system, then they can use Jawa, Dart, Kotlin/Native, whatever they fell like.
  - greggman2 7y ago
    I don't really get your argument. gcc has lots of non-standard extensions. Should gcc not be able to call itself a c++ compiler?
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Android Java is a subset of cherry picked features of Java and its standard library, with support varying across Android version. GCC is an ISO C++ and ISO C compliant compiler, plus a set of language extensions. Any ISO C++ or ISO C code will compile under GCC. Not every piece of standard compliant Java code will compile under Android Java. Not only this produces a burden writting portable Java libraries, it creates a false perception to many developers that learned Java via Android and assume Android Java == Java. The later point is usually used by Google when they sell how Kotlin fares against Java, because naturally if they would compare it against a proper up to date version, some of the plus points wouldn't uphold.

rasz 7y ago

IBM should be warming up their lawyers to sue Oracle for SQL.

Joeri 7y ago
Nah, oracle’s sql is so different there’s hardly any overlap with standard sql.

stopadvertising 7y ago

Why does it matter? The API is as dead as the telegraph, everyone is just building garden walls higher instead. I worked on and with lots of APIs back in the day. They are all gone. All of them. Eliminated for business reasons. The internet has become a tool for carving out fiefdoms of engagement to be monetized, it's not about connecting people or systems anymore.

snarf21 7y ago

Exactly this. Oracle is nothing but a common patent troll here. They bought SUN for one and only one purpose..... to sue Google. I know someone involved in the preliminary investigations into this. It is not a secret at all. It would be awesome if Google would take the Cloudflare approach and try to crowdsource prior art for all of Oracle's patents. (Best case, 1M software patents go away on all sides) Hopefully as things continue to the cloud with private options and their loss of the JEDI contract puts them right out of business.

pacala 7y ago
Google had the option to buy SUN, too.
- dudus 7y ago
  Why would they buy it if they weren't interested in the prospect of suing other people with it? In hindsight it would be a great defensive buy,but there's no way they could foresee this shit storm caused by this absurd lawsuit.
  - pacala 7y ago
    For the rights to the proprietary language around which they built their flagship mobile platform.

pacala 7y ago

Not copyrightable APIs is a fairly dangerous precedent. 1. Good APIs are hard. 2. Under Alsup's ruling, good luck competing with AWS sales org when they decide to offer your own APIs as a service. 3. Nothing prevents Google from inventing their own APIs, and licensing them under whatever terms they like. As of Google vs. Oracle, it's pretty clear that Google appropriated Java to benefit from its penetration in the market place, instead of putting in the hard work to build their own. Apple has built their own ecosystem, ObjectiveC/Cocoa/Swift/SwiftUI. Microsoft has built their own ecosystem, C#/DotNet, or adopted and contributed to open standards, HTML5/Javascript/Typescript. Heck, even HP has built WebOS around open standards.

orangecat 7y ago
good luck competing with AWS sales org when they decide to offer your own APIs as a service If the only advantage you have over AWS is that developers would have to change the function names in their code, you're dead anyway. And copyrightable APIs mean that you can't offer an API compatible with AWS as a way to get developers to try your platform in the first place.

LeftHandPath 7y ago

Honestly, they need to put it into layman's terms. The exposed function calls of an API are meant to be implementation-blind. Let's say car-company A builds the first ever car that's operated with a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch pedal, and shifter. Then, Company B comes along and - both to create a complete control system for the car AND to potentially benefit consumers who are already familiar with those controls - also uses a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, clutch pedal, and shifter. The steering column and its inner workings are completely different. The gas pedal activates a V8 combustion engine instead of an I4. The clutch pedal triggers a dual clutch for faster shifting between gears. The brake pedal activates disc brakes instead of drum-brakes. The appeals court is, in effect, saying that Company B has violated copyright because, when faced with the same problem, they came up with a solution that looks very similar on the outside. They turn a blind eye - willingly or unwillingly - to all the new engineering that went on to improve the product and create a new expression of an automobile.

smokinman 7y ago

Yeah, fancy a scumbag using the legal system to hold people to ransom with their worthless and bogus claim. Sounds a bit like what Peter Vessenes is doing to 25,000 creditors of MtGox, even after being offered an incredibly generous $10 million dollar kiss off.