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Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one. > Did Oracle infringe Amazon's copyright here? Ars Technica contac

• nimbius 7y ago
  how do Ceph and PureStorage handle their S3 implementations? the API doesnt seem variable enough that I cant use duplicity to send/receive with either of these...
• paulddraper 7y ago
  It is contradictory, but until the courts finally decide whether an API can be copyrighted, no one knows if they have to pay royalties or not, Oracle included.
• rhacker 7y ago
  It seems perfectly reasonable for Oracle to defend itself in court this way. It's kinda like an automatic win - if they get the Google lawsuit, then hey - bank... and then they will likely lose this case - but the stakes are pretty much tiny. Also AWS would have to go after a bunch of open source replicas of S3 too - which they probably DON'T want to do. And if they don't, Oracle may have a counter case in that it was unjustifiably targeted. However if they lose the Google case, then hey, they did nothing wrong here. Seems like a win win for Oracle.
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  • dangus 7y ago
    Oracle is the #1 law firm in Silicon Valley. Strangely, they seem to have a software side business.
    • lowdose 7y ago
      Hence the Larry Ellison trade, a cousin of the Bob Rubin trade. Rent-seeking behavior in software development. Wall garden, vendor lock, license, and litigate for every LOC. Make customers pay for technical debt by dumping more exotic spaghetti code. Larry Ellison's way of doing business is about him and what he receives at the bottom line. The customer is an after fact in the sales funnel. A resource that needs to be milked as a proper cash cow. Larry Ellison is as a evil as the offspring of Joffrey and Cersei Lannister could be. https://www.isegoria.net/2017/05/the-bob-rubin-trade/ https://www.isegoria.net/2017/05/the-bob-rubin-trade/
  • rubinelli 7y ago
    Copyright is not like trademark. Amazon can choose to enforce it selectively, and it should not influence any specific case.
    • Crosseye_Jack 7y ago
      However if they choose not to defend it they may be opening themselves up to an “implied licence” defence from others in the future. (Though they could then revoke their license but anything created up to that point may be considered as under that implied license if the implied license defence plays off. Think of it a bit like changing from an open source license to one that’s not, you would still be allowed to work with the older open source version if you wanted) What would be a better option (IMO) then just not enforcing your rights would be to get an nominal fee from the entities you like and in return grant them a favourable license. (Not a lawyer, go ask your own lawyer if you want specific legal advice)
• twblalock 7y ago
  > Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one. As a legal strategy, that's not a problem, and in fact it's what lawyers are supposed to do: make the best possible arguments they can in any case they are a part of. It should not be interpreted as a case of corporate schizophrenia -- it's just the lawyers doing their jobs. This can lead to contradictory positions if multiple cases are going on at the same time. That's fine. The legal system is designed around the assumption that this will happen.
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  • fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I think at Supreme Court level such a contradiction could be a (minor) problem, because the economic consequences of API copyrightability without fair use play a big role in that case. If Oracle's use of Amazon's API was based on an industry-wide fair use assumption that has supported the industry's economic viability over decades that could damage their argument. However, I think that Oracle would argue that there is no contradiction. In the case now before the US Supreme Court, Oracle argues that software copyrights do extend to the interface/API and that reimplementing the interface does not constitute fair use. With regard to Amazon's API, Oracle argues that the license grants them permission to reimplement the interface. This argument doesn't rely on disputing copyrightability of APIs or on fair use. It simply says that copyright holders get to decide whether or not reimplementation is permitted.
    • ratel 7y ago
      Oracle will argue anything as long as it suites them. That seems to be the nature of modern litigation. Fact in this matter is that the license for the Amazon API does allow the API to be copied. But Oracle did and does not follow the license, because the required attribution is missing. They are therefor not protected by the license. It is like using an illegal copy of Windows and claiming you had the right to use it under the license for the small omission of not having paid for it. Even if the change the code to include attribution they are still liable for significant damages to Amazon for the period preceding the correction. Amazon can claim to them the attribution is a very significant part of the license agreement: It would deter competitors having to advertise Amazon and tell their customers that their product was actually invented by someone having a competing product. Google can claim their fair use was actually already common practice, as most of us thought. Even Oracle itself assumed and acted on that assumption that copying APIs was fair use / not copyrightable and did not require following a license agreement, as they did not. Worst case for Google is that they should not have to pay significant damages for something they and others would see as a common mistake and Oracle's reversal complying with the Amazon license is proof that there was no established judicial practice to follow. So Oracle is in a pickle: Either they claim copying the Amazon API was fair-use, or APIs are not copyrightable and they lose the case against Google. Or they claim that the license of Amazon allowed for copying of the API and they violated that license. The harder they push Google in the later case the bigger the risk Amazon will claim their share of Oracle's pie in return. Better get the spreadsheets out.
• treis 7y ago
  >I don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation, and skip the SDK altogether. :) They took an open source piece of software (the SDK) and made a derivative work (the backend the SDK uses). That indeed is copying and is essentially identical to what Google did. But there's no copyright violation here because Amazon explicitly granted everyone the right to do that by releasing the SDK under the Apache license.
  • TheGoddessInari 7y ago
    OpenJDK is GPLv2 with linking exception. I fail to see how it substantively differs.
    • dtech 7y ago
      Only thing I can think of is that APL2 is much more liberal than GPL
    • danarmak 7y ago
      Dalvik is APL licensed, so it can't be benefitting from a GPL license grant in any way. The GPL only lets you distribute derivative copies that are also under the GPL.
      • Oletros 7y ago
        Dalvik didn't infringed java copyright, Dalvik case was involved with patents
  • gpm 7y ago
    Oracle did not comply with the SDKs license, nor did Google comply with openjdk's license. Google acknowledge's this and isn't bothering to try and argue otherwise. They aren't presenting openjdk's license as a defense to infringement. Oracle for whatever reason is ignoring that issue in their statement to ars technica.
• tzs 7y ago
  Maybe they are trying to take advantage of some procedural quirks. When Oracle sued Google, the case originally had both copyright claims and patent claims. Is Amazon's API patented? If not, then if Amazon were to sue Oracle it would be only a copyright case, not a patent and copyright case. Normally, appeals from most cases, including copyright cases, go to the appeals court for the same Circuit that the district court that heard the case is in, which would be the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (9th CA) in the case of Oracle vs. Google, and most likely also in an Amazon vs. Oracle. However, if the case includes patent claims the appeal goes to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) instead of going to the CA for the circuit containing the district court. If the case includes both patent claims and non-patent claims, the whole thing goes to CAFC which decides both the patent issues and the non-patent issues. On patent issues, CAFC decisions are precedent for all district courts. On those issues that get dragged along when a mixed case ends up at CAFC because it includes patent issues, CAFC is supposed to follow the precedent of the appeals court for the Circuit the case came from. A lot of people believe that CAFC totally botched following 9th CA precedent in the Google case. If Amazon sues Oracle but doesn't have a patent claim included to force appeals to CAFC, the appeal will end up at the 9th CA, which presumably will do a better job of following 9th CA precedent than CAFC did, and so rule against the API copyright (and so in favor of Oracle). Until the Supreme Court actually gets around to settling this matter, we are in an inconsistent state in the 9th Circuit. 1. As far as specifically Google and Oracle are concerned, Oracle's API is copyrighted and what Google did infringes. CAFC said so when it handled the appeal, and that is binding precedent to the lower courts in any further proceeding between those two litigants. 2. For API copyright claims that are not between Oracle and Google and are not accompanied by a patent claim, the law is still what it was before the Google case. 3. For API copyright claims that are not between Oracle and Google but are accompanied by a patent claim, and so will be appealed through CAFC instead of 9th CA, presumably they will end up with the same wrong outcome as Oracle vs. Google.
• spullara 7y ago
  Java wasn't opensource. It had a specific license for mobile phones. The reason that Android didn't use their VM was the $1/device licensing fee for using Java on mobile devices. They reimplemented everything in order to avoid that $1.
• thaumasiotes 7y ago
  >> However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders. While that is indeed the difference between using the API and implementing the API, I was under the impression that the Google-Oracle dispute was about the API itself, not the implementation. In the restaurant analogy, that would be the menu ("hash browns"), not the cook ("the customer wants hash browns, what are you going to do about it?").
• bitL 7y ago
  Oracle used the Android lawsuit as a test how far the law can be pushed, that's why they insisted on pushing for more and prolonged the lawsuit, in order to clarify how far can be copyright law extended. Now they received the information and could incorporate it to their risk analysis wrt copying Amazon's API who is their primary competitor. View it as a "law algorithm".
• syshum 7y ago
  Oracle, and many other tech companies, are experts at talking out of both sides of their mouth saying contrary things in different context's This is common any more in legal battles. Where a company will take a position in one case that is completely contrary to its position in a different legal case