14 ms·

Trump administration backs Oracle in Google fight

228 points by dsil 7y ago

bediger4000 7y ago
Does the Trump administration understand what this kind of law will do to all of tech?
- user00012-ab 7y ago
  Does trump understand anything?
- gnulinux 7y ago
  Of course not.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Oracle winning will not destroy the tech industry, bring innovation to it's knees, or any other crazy apocalyptic concept people have. It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.
  - cromwellian 7y ago
    Riiiight. Because no lawyers have ever smelled a new ambulance to chase kicking off dozens of harassment suits when new precedents are handed down. Oracle has already threatened OSS databases, Samba was once threatened by Microsoft aggressively, and whose to say WINE and other OSS API reimplementations won't be under legal threat the way Unix reimplementations were. Any precedent that establishes clean-room API reimplementations are subject to copyright infringement is bad for everyone. You're willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Yes, that's possible. But patents are already just as powerful, actually much more so. They cause a lot of problems but haven't caused the tech industry to collapse in a MAD Mexican standoff of lawsuits.
vikingcaffiene 7y ago
IMO there's two ways to read this: either A) this is a baldly transparent attempt to "own the libs" and punish a company that the administration sees as a threat or B) they are too incompetent to understand the technical nuances of the case and are essentially morons. Maybe both? This administration can't be thrown out on their collective asses fast enough...
- cwperkins 7y ago
  Please elaborate on the details of the case. You seem to be keenly aware of the nuances. I haven’t been following the case, but please let me know why you have reached the conclusions that you have.
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  Both. 50 years of people cynically saying "all politicians are crooks". And now we have legitimate sleazeballs running the country and nobody believes it. On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that. We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    One of the most jarring things about the impeachment saga was Trump supporters defending him by saying "all presidents do it". Fundamentally the issue is norms are easy to break if a bunch of people don't know what they are and don't care enough to find out.
    - eldude 7y ago
      You may be missing the point. When you look past the double standard, the criminality (collusion, corruption, embezzlement, lies, favorable pardons and lack of prosecution) is disproportionately on one side. And of course there’s the tiny detail that Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party first to even broach the Democrats. See all the #nevertrump senators that prioritized #resisting Trump in spite of their constituents and his support amongst the party.
seren 7y ago
I did not follow every step, but assuming Oracle win this, will it also apply to Amazon proposing DocumentDB with the same API that MongoDB ?
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  Who even knows? If APIs are copyrighted and implementing them is a crime, Tim Berners-Lee might end up a billionaire.
  - AdamN 7y ago
    :-) Actually CERN would get that $$$
  - coldpie 7y ago
    I wonder who "invented" the blink tag? Or the other hundreds of thousands of APIs every web browser implements? And who is responsible for those browser API implementations shipped to millions end users in hundreds of thousands of products? If you thought patent trolling was bad, Oracle just turned that into a molehill.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    See also everyone (including Oracle) that copied Perl 5's regular expression API, and typically even say that straight in their own documentation (again, including Java's).
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      How does Java not copy much of C's API / syntax and type system -- which I'm sure is mostly copied from something else. It's turtles all the way down.
- 737min 7y ago
  Or Postgres APIs? Nginx plugins? Etc
  - 7y ago
rvz 7y ago
This is the absolute reason why Dart, Flutter and Fuchsia exist. You can now imagine that if a loss from Google in this lawsuit were to happen, it would mean royalties in the billions for Oracle which Google won't pay for, or at least for a long time for Android. So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Ironically, Samsung invested in Tizen development for a minute so they would have their own backup in case Android was no longer viable. And it's also amusing that the Dart-skeptics now see there is at least one legal reason to justify Google's continued development of Flutter.
  - bitL 7y ago
    Tizen is a horrible mess, nobody wants to develop in that ecosystem. Samsung might dream about it being their backup, but their API is brain-damaging.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      I've read multiple articles about that, yeah. Their support in their own platform was clearly half-hearted and short-lived. But my point is that that they seemed to have the same motivations for investing in Tizen as Google seemingly does in Fuchsia.
  - nialv7 7y ago
    Tizen is still a thing though, just not in the smart phone space. Tons of smart TVs are shipped with Tizen. Last smart watch that uses Tizen is shipped in 2018.
    - panpanna 7y ago
      > Last smart watch that uses Tizen is shipped in 2018. 2020
choward 7y ago
> The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun. Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference). https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-dont-need-anybodys-money/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-d...
- TehCorwiz 7y ago
  It's because it's all lies. One day 1 he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd and that set the stage. A person willing to lie about the most meaningless things will definitely lie about the meaningful ones. I don't even know why I'm responding to this. I'm tired of the lying, but moreover I'm tired of people pretending that he doesn't lie constantly and egregiously about everything. I'm tired of people arguing in good faith against verifiable falsehoods, when there's no return of faith in the discussion. You can't "gotcha" him or his followers. It doesn't matter to them. "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul-Sartre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...
cletus 7y ago
Of course they do. Some might point to Larry Ellison being a major supporter [1] but I think the real motivation is this plays into the narrative that Google is somehow biased against conservatives. What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here: 1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now; Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license? 2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen. [1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-larry-ellison-to-cancel-trump-fundraiser-2020-02-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-l... [2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/
- bitL 7y ago
  Jonathan Schwartz was always complaining about Google using SUN's API; they hoped Google would write them a nice fat check and be BFFs but Google decided to be selfish and just used and replaced SUN's tech. I think combination of ex-SUN's people mood and Oracle's lawyer-heavy structure couldn't have led to a different outcome.
chubot 7y ago
Question: if this lawsuit goes in Oracle's favor, what does that mean for WINE? Isn't that the same issue? WINE provides compatible Windows APIs. Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kyrra 7y ago
WSJ had an interesting piece a week ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-the-flames-against-rival-tech-giants-11581615873 https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-... TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.
- paulmd 7y ago
  Google can still get Trump's endorsement, just write him a check and he'll back Google instead. Worked for a pardon, Paul Pogue's family just wrote a $200k check and voila, he's pardoned. The office of president has never been more transparently for sale (ahem, "open for business") and there's absolutely no chance the Senate will perform any accountability here. He could literally murder someone on 7th avenue and there would be 51 votes against conviction. Sad that it's come to this, but if it's $200k vs an industry-destroying precedent getting set, well... google should suck it up and write the check.
mips_avatar 7y ago
I feel like in a normal presidential administration the support of the president is great for companies. With this administration it's a liability.
- ratsmack 7y ago
  Please define what a "normal presidential administration" looks like.
  - sixothree 7y ago
    One whose stated goal is not the destruction of democratic institutions?
  - mips_avatar 7y ago
    One that has more bi-partisan buy in, and just generally less controversial. Basically every administration in the last 50 years except for Nixon post-watergate, and Trump.
mint2 7y ago
Is this in anyway tied to Ellison recently hosting a trump fund raiser?
- jVinc 7y ago
  Politically correct answer: No, they are completely independent just like all other fundraising activities. Reality: Yes, Oracle is openly bribing the president to get the administration to push their agenda.
bayindirh 7y ago
Wouldn't allowing weaponization of APIs via copyrights throw interoperability out of the window? If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in their own tech sector.
quotemstr 7y ago
Is there any doubt that this is some kind of score-settling? Republicans hate Google. I don't think people inside the SV bubble appreciate just how intense this hatred has become. You know the seething, implacable anger, that bile that comes up out of your stomach when you think of a politician you don't like? A lot of republicans feel that way about Google. This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades. Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".
- hpoe 7y ago
  I'll throw out there that I am a Republican and I don't hate google, I don't hate it with a mindless passion and seeing red at the very mention of its name type of thing. Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both. But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not. Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice. My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both. I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> At an earlier stage in litigation, the Obama administration took a similar position, urging the Supreme Court not to accept Google's appeal. It seems the Trump administration position is not really all that different than the previous administrations.
- jrs235 7y ago
  So to reverse the Trump administration's support, everyone should just start tweeting how Trump agrees with Obama and supports the Obama administration's position on this issue...
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    Given how much space Twitter seems to occupy in Trump's head, maybe this is the only possible channel of control... maybe lock his feed up in some sort of info bubble just like politicians want to do to us.
    - sixothree 7y ago
      I would love to see his twitter browsing history. I'm genuinely curious how he came to find some of the stuff he posts.
- tzs 7y ago
  Different appeals concerning different issues. The first one was over the outcome of the first trial. When the Supreme Court did not step in and overturn CAFC's overturning of the first trial, there was a second trial to determine whether Google's use was fair use. The first trial had not reached that issue. The trial court said it was, CAFC overturned that. This present appeal is on that issue.
ur-whale 7y ago
20 years of supporting the dems financially and otherwise ... what goes around comes around.
- voxl 7y ago
  What does this even mean? That you should be wary that your country will eventually go insane and elect a proto-fascist? Who in there right mind would do business that way?
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    Will? Where have you been since 2016? Too far down that path already. I hesitate to mention the Dead Zone...
gdsdfe 7y ago
Haha of course it is, the guy is organizing a fund raiser for Trump's campaign
tus88 7y ago
> The administration found Google's policy arguments are "unpersuasive" and argued software code is copyrightable. What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  That was part of it. This article is light on details, but there was one part of the codebase that was copied verbatim. It was the RangeCheck function. Google argued that the function in question was not copywritable, and judge Alsup agreed (after learning how to write code). [1] It’s unclear to me if the administration only sides with Oracle on this count, or also on reimplementation of APIs, which would have sweeping impacts. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
  - kickopotomus 7y ago
    Honestly, I feel that it would almost be worse if the Court ruled in Oracle's favor on the ability to copyright intuitively obvious functions. There are only so may ways to write `return x >= a && x <= b;` that aren't unnecessarily obtuse and contrived. It's honestly tantamount to being able to copyright math itself.
    - tetha 7y ago
      I know this is inappropriate.. but to me, it sounds like a fascinating and hilarious dystopian visions... there'd be entire legal teams dedicated to find, and claim and defend the corporate specific ways to implement.. a range check (NO! Don't put a space there! Oh dear!). Or, if a number is even. And an eternal cultural feud between the "is-even"-clan and the "is-odd"-triad. Once we include mercenaries hired to steal certificates about a specific is-odd implementation, we're in a really weird kind of cyberpunk or shadow run. Also, don't count the number of paragraphs in this comment and think about them. Don't! Or else!
  - mohaine 7y ago
    It has been YEARS but the the RangeCheck function was copied but ruled as too small to matter.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nhebb 7y ago
Did anyone here bother to check the bio's of the officials listed on the amicus brief? If so, you'd discover that the many (maybe most, I didn't count) were holdovers from previous administrations. But, conspiracy theories are fun, I guess. Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.
- thu2111 7y ago
  Your last sentence nails it. The problem with this case is that the legally correct thing is that Oracle wins. The most desirable practical outcome is that they lose. Copyright protects creative works. It's not clear why an API wouldn't be a creative work. Oracle's lawyers argue that it is a creative work, because different people can come up with very different designs to solve the same problem, that API design is a skilled and creative process. They're right. The tech industry has always been in an unstable situation with respect to this consensual interpretation that APIs are facts and not creative works. That's convenient for many people, but tricky to legally support. The correct solution to this problem is an exemption in copyright law for APIs. Given no such exemption exists, why should Oracle not win this case? The judges are meant to rule on law as it is, not what it should be.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
AlleyTrotter 7y ago
To be fair How much has Google contributed to the Trump campaign? Sick and tired of media blaming everything on DJT.
- benignslime 7y ago
  Hahaha don't read the article too closely. > The big picture: The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun. Fucking Trumpanzee. Get out've here.
- DarknessFalls 7y ago
  Probably not as sick and tired as most people are of DJT.
just_myles 7y ago
Complete and utter madness. I think they're simply doing this to be contrarian.
QUFB 7y ago
For those commenting on the thread how Google hates Republicans, their PAC donates equally to both parties (technically a bit more to Reps): https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623
PHGamer 7y ago
seems to me google should be brown nosing more if it wants a fighting chance. else they will lose once trump is reelected.
jbritton 7y ago
I so fear the law suits over every tiny interface. push, pop, insert, remove, put, get, post, delete, open, close, read, write, send, recv, begin, end, next, prev, find, filter, sort, groupby, start, stop, sqrt, log, exp. Synonyms not allowed.
jVinc 7y ago
Bribe the president: Definitely not ok. What sort of backwards ass country would allow that sort of thing? Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all. It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.
floppiplopp 7y ago
"The best democracy money can buy!" -Larry Ellison https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google...

228 points by dsil 7y ago

bediger4000 7y ago

Does the Trump administration understand what this kind of law will do to all of tech?

user00012-ab 7y ago
Does trump understand anything?
gnulinux 7y ago
Of course not.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Oracle winning will not destroy the tech industry, bring innovation to it's knees, or any other crazy apocalyptic concept people have. It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  Riiiight. Because no lawyers have ever smelled a new ambulance to chase kicking off dozens of harassment suits when new precedents are handed down. Oracle has already threatened OSS databases, Samba was once threatened by Microsoft aggressively, and whose to say WINE and other OSS API reimplementations won't be under legal threat the way Unix reimplementations were. Any precedent that establishes clean-room API reimplementations are subject to copyright infringement is bad for everyone. You're willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Yes, that's possible. But patents are already just as powerful, actually much more so. They cause a lot of problems but haven't caused the tech industry to collapse in a MAD Mexican standoff of lawsuits.

vikingcaffiene 7y ago

IMO there's two ways to read this: either A) this is a baldly transparent attempt to "own the libs" and punish a company that the administration sees as a threat or B) they are too incompetent to understand the technical nuances of the case and are essentially morons. Maybe both? This administration can't be thrown out on their collective asses fast enough...

cwperkins 7y ago
Please elaborate on the details of the case. You seem to be keenly aware of the nuances. I haven’t been following the case, but please let me know why you have reached the conclusions that you have.
0xff00ffee 7y ago
Both. 50 years of people cynically saying "all politicians are crooks". And now we have legitimate sleazeballs running the country and nobody believes it. On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that. We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  One of the most jarring things about the impeachment saga was Trump supporters defending him by saying "all presidents do it". Fundamentally the issue is norms are easy to break if a bunch of people don't know what they are and don't care enough to find out.
  - eldude 7y ago
    You may be missing the point. When you look past the double standard, the criminality (collusion, corruption, embezzlement, lies, favorable pardons and lack of prosecution) is disproportionately on one side. And of course there’s the tiny detail that Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party first to even broach the Democrats. See all the #nevertrump senators that prioritized #resisting Trump in spite of their constituents and his support amongst the party.

seren 7y ago

I did not follow every step, but assuming Oracle win this, will it also apply to Amazon proposing DocumentDB with the same API that MongoDB ?

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
Who even knows? If APIs are copyrighted and implementing them is a crime, Tim Berners-Lee might end up a billionaire.
- AdamN 7y ago
  :-) Actually CERN would get that $$$
- coldpie 7y ago
  I wonder who "invented" the blink tag? Or the other hundreds of thousands of APIs every web browser implements? And who is responsible for those browser API implementations shipped to millions end users in hundreds of thousands of products? If you thought patent trolling was bad, Oracle just turned that into a molehill.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  See also everyone (including Oracle) that copied Perl 5's regular expression API, and typically even say that straight in their own documentation (again, including Java's).
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    How does Java not copy much of C's API / syntax and type system -- which I'm sure is mostly copied from something else. It's turtles all the way down.
737min 7y ago
Or Postgres APIs? Nginx plugins? Etc
- 7y ago

rvz 7y ago

This is the absolute reason why Dart, Flutter and Fuchsia exist. You can now imagine that if a loss from Google in this lawsuit were to happen, it would mean royalties in the billions for Oracle which Google won't pay for, or at least for a long time for Android. So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.

Apocryphon 7y ago
Ironically, Samsung invested in Tizen development for a minute so they would have their own backup in case Android was no longer viable. And it's also amusing that the Dart-skeptics now see there is at least one legal reason to justify Google's continued development of Flutter.
- bitL 7y ago
  Tizen is a horrible mess, nobody wants to develop in that ecosystem. Samsung might dream about it being their backup, but their API is brain-damaging.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    I've read multiple articles about that, yeah. Their support in their own platform was clearly half-hearted and short-lived. But my point is that that they seemed to have the same motivations for investing in Tizen as Google seemingly does in Fuchsia.
- nialv7 7y ago
  Tizen is still a thing though, just not in the smart phone space. Tons of smart TVs are shipped with Tizen. Last smart watch that uses Tizen is shipped in 2018.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    > Last smart watch that uses Tizen is shipped in 2018. 2020

choward 7y ago

> The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun. Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference). https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-dont-need-anybodys-money/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-d...

TehCorwiz 7y ago
It's because it's all lies. One day 1 he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd and that set the stage. A person willing to lie about the most meaningless things will definitely lie about the meaningful ones. I don't even know why I'm responding to this. I'm tired of the lying, but moreover I'm tired of people pretending that he doesn't lie constantly and egregiously about everything. I'm tired of people arguing in good faith against verifiable falsehoods, when there's no return of faith in the discussion. You can't "gotcha" him or his followers. It doesn't matter to them. "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." - Jean Paul-Sartre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Dona...

cletus 7y ago

Of course they do. Some might point to Larry Ellison being a major supporter [1] but I think the real motivation is this plays into the narrative that Google is somehow biased against conservatives. What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here: 1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now; Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license? 2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen. [1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-larry-ellison-to-cancel-trump-fundraiser-2020-02-18 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-l... [2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/ https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/

bitL 7y ago
Jonathan Schwartz was always complaining about Google using SUN's API; they hoped Google would write them a nice fat check and be BFFs but Google decided to be selfish and just used and replaced SUN's tech. I think combination of ex-SUN's people mood and Oracle's lawyer-heavy structure couldn't have led to a different outcome.

chubot 7y ago

Question: if this lawsuit goes in Oracle's favor, what does that mean for WINE? Isn't that the same issue? WINE provides compatible Windows APIs. Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

kyrra 7y ago

WSJ had an interesting piece a week ago: https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-the-flames-against-rival-tech-giants-11581615873 https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-... TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.

paulmd 7y ago
Google can still get Trump's endorsement, just write him a check and he'll back Google instead. Worked for a pardon, Paul Pogue's family just wrote a $200k check and voila, he's pardoned. The office of president has never been more transparently for sale (ahem, "open for business") and there's absolutely no chance the Senate will perform any accountability here. He could literally murder someone on 7th avenue and there would be 51 votes against conviction. Sad that it's come to this, but if it's $200k vs an industry-destroying precedent getting set, well... google should suck it up and write the check.

mips_avatar 7y ago

I feel like in a normal presidential administration the support of the president is great for companies. With this administration it's a liability.

ratsmack 7y ago
Please define what a "normal presidential administration" looks like.
- sixothree 7y ago
  One whose stated goal is not the destruction of democratic institutions?
- mips_avatar 7y ago
  One that has more bi-partisan buy in, and just generally less controversial. Basically every administration in the last 50 years except for Nixon post-watergate, and Trump.

mint2 7y ago

Is this in anyway tied to Ellison recently hosting a trump fund raiser?

jVinc 7y ago
Politically correct answer: No, they are completely independent just like all other fundraising activities. Reality: Yes, Oracle is openly bribing the president to get the administration to push their agenda.

bayindirh 7y ago

Wouldn't allowing weaponization of APIs via copyrights throw interoperability out of the window? If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in their own tech sector.

quotemstr 7y ago

Is there any doubt that this is some kind of score-settling? Republicans hate Google. I don't think people inside the SV bubble appreciate just how intense this hatred has become. You know the seething, implacable anger, that bile that comes up out of your stomach when you think of a politician you don't like? A lot of republicans feel that way about Google. This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades. Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".

hpoe 7y ago
I'll throw out there that I am a Republican and I don't hate google, I don't hate it with a mindless passion and seeing red at the very mention of its name type of thing. Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both. But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not. Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice. My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both. I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

> At an earlier stage in litigation, the Obama administration took a similar position, urging the Supreme Court not to accept Google's appeal. It seems the Trump administration position is not really all that different than the previous administrations.

jrs235 7y ago
So to reverse the Trump administration's support, everyone should just start tweeting how Trump agrees with Obama and supports the Obama administration's position on this issue...
- zentiggr 7y ago
  Given how much space Twitter seems to occupy in Trump's head, maybe this is the only possible channel of control... maybe lock his feed up in some sort of info bubble just like politicians want to do to us.
  - sixothree 7y ago
    I would love to see his twitter browsing history. I'm genuinely curious how he came to find some of the stuff he posts.
tzs 7y ago
Different appeals concerning different issues. The first one was over the outcome of the first trial. When the Supreme Court did not step in and overturn CAFC's overturning of the first trial, there was a second trial to determine whether Google's use was fair use. The first trial had not reached that issue. The trial court said it was, CAFC overturned that. This present appeal is on that issue.

ur-whale 7y ago

20 years of supporting the dems financially and otherwise ... what goes around comes around.

voxl 7y ago
What does this even mean? That you should be wary that your country will eventually go insane and elect a proto-fascist? Who in there right mind would do business that way?
- zentiggr 7y ago
  Will? Where have you been since 2016? Too far down that path already. I hesitate to mention the Dead Zone...

gdsdfe 7y ago

Haha of course it is, the guy is organizing a fund raiser for Trump's campaign

tus88 7y ago

> The administration found Google's policy arguments are "unpersuasive" and argued software code is copyrightable. What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?

ViViDboarder 7y ago
That was part of it. This article is light on details, but there was one part of the codebase that was copied verbatim. It was the RangeCheck function. Google argued that the function in question was not copywritable, and judge Alsup agreed (after learning how to write code). [1] It’s unclear to me if the administration only sides with Oracle on this count, or also on reimplementation of APIs, which would have sweeping impacts. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-google-judge-william-alsup-interview-waymo-uber https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
- kickopotomus 7y ago
  Honestly, I feel that it would almost be worse if the Court ruled in Oracle's favor on the ability to copyright intuitively obvious functions. There are only so may ways to write `return x >= a && x <= b;` that aren't unnecessarily obtuse and contrived. It's honestly tantamount to being able to copyright math itself.
  - tetha 7y ago
    I know this is inappropriate.. but to me, it sounds like a fascinating and hilarious dystopian visions... there'd be entire legal teams dedicated to find, and claim and defend the corporate specific ways to implement.. a range check (NO! Don't put a space there! Oh dear!). Or, if a number is even. And an eternal cultural feud between the "is-even"-clan and the "is-odd"-triad. Once we include mercenaries hired to steal certificates about a specific is-odd implementation, we're in a really weird kind of cyberpunk or shadow run. Also, don't count the number of paragraphs in this comment and think about them. Don't! Or else!
- mohaine 7y ago
  It has been YEARS but the the RangeCheck function was copied but ruled as too small to matter.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

nhebb 7y ago

Did anyone here bother to check the bio's of the officials listed on the amicus brief? If so, you'd discover that the many (maybe most, I didn't count) were holdovers from previous administrations. But, conspiracy theories are fun, I guess. Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.

thu2111 7y ago
Your last sentence nails it. The problem with this case is that the legally correct thing is that Oracle wins. The most desirable practical outcome is that they lose. Copyright protects creative works. It's not clear why an API wouldn't be a creative work. Oracle's lawyers argue that it is a creative work, because different people can come up with very different designs to solve the same problem, that API design is a skilled and creative process. They're right. The tech industry has always been in an unstable situation with respect to this consensual interpretation that APIs are facts and not creative works. That's convenient for many people, but tricky to legally support. The correct solution to this problem is an exemption in copyright law for APIs. Given no such exemption exists, why should Oracle not win this case? The judges are meant to rule on law as it is, not what it should be.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

AlleyTrotter 7y ago

To be fair How much has Google contributed to the Trump campaign? Sick and tired of media blaming everything on DJT.

benignslime 7y ago
Hahaha don't read the article too closely. > The big picture: The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun. Fucking Trumpanzee. Get out've here.
DarknessFalls 7y ago
Probably not as sick and tired as most people are of DJT.

just_myles 7y ago

Complete and utter madness. I think they're simply doing this to be contrarian.

QUFB 7y ago

For those commenting on the thread how Google hates Republicans, their PAC donates equally to both parties (technically a bit more to Reps): https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623

PHGamer 7y ago

seems to me google should be brown nosing more if it wants a fighting chance. else they will lose once trump is reelected.

jbritton 7y ago

I so fear the law suits over every tiny interface. push, pop, insert, remove, put, get, post, delete, open, close, read, write, send, recv, begin, end, next, prev, find, filter, sort, groupby, start, stop, sqrt, log, exp. Synonyms not allowed.

jVinc 7y ago

Bribe the president: Definitely not ok. What sort of backwards ass country would allow that sort of thing? Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all. It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.

floppiplopp 7y ago

"The best democracy money can buy!" -Larry Ellison https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google...