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> If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste br

by mantap 6y ago

> If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement. This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything.

jasode 6y ago
>If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming : [...] Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked." Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 976. [...] [1] don't know where the canonical source is so I provide a Google search link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s+%22java.lang.Math.max%22+example%2C+Oracle+explains+that+the+developers+could+have+called+it+any+number+of+things%2C https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s...
- mantap 6y ago
  If I take a book, say Harry Potter, and use a thesaurus to change words to their synonyms in the hopes of avoiding copyright, no court is going to agree that I can now publish Barry Otter and the Association of the Eagle as my own creation.
  - angel_j 6y ago
    Hirsute Jugmaker, and the...
  - Doddler 6y ago
    I don't know if that's true. At least it you wrote a story which is almost exactly like Harry Potter from scratch, without referencing the original and with none of the original characters, I don't believe this would be an issue under current copyright rules.
    - radford-neal 6y ago
      But you won't. I don't think the law cares about hypothetical occurrences that have probability less than 10^-100000000000.
    - tzs 6y ago
      That's true, but not relevant to the point of the comment you are replying to. Taking a copy of an existing work, and simply replacing words with synonyms and renaming characters would still count as copying. Maybe there would be enough creativity in your choice of synonyms to make your work separately copyrightable as a derivative work, but that would still require permission of the existing work's copyright owner. Producing a new work that happens to be similar to, or even word for word identical to an existing work, if you truly created it yourself from scratch without taking anything from the existing work, would not be copying. As a practical matter, unless you had extraordinary proof that you really had never read Harry Potter books, watched the movies, read the plot summaries on Wikipedia, attended a party shortly after one of the books came out where everyone was talking about it, you would lose in a copyright infringement lawsuit. If you work is very similar to Harry Potter and you had access to Harry Potter, that's sufficient for the plaintiff to make their case, switching the burden to you to prove that you did not copy it.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        A book is subject to veru different considerations - it has a plot, main characters, and other characteristics that you would be copying. All of these are a protected product of the author's creativity. There is no plot in an API, no main characters, etc. It communicates matters of technical nature, and there aren't five different way of writing 'sqrt()' or whatever. It is more appropriately compares to architechtural blueprints and other technical documents.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  My vague recollection of this case is that Oracle was kind of up a creek with the "java.lang.Math.max" argument, because max() itself is such a well-understood mathematical function and has been defined in numerous programming languages before Java. This put some constraints on Oracle, and thus "the name is the copyrightable contribution" became their (weak) argument. This does not necessarily mean that changing the function name (as opposed to calling interface and interface organization) would have been sufficient to avoid copyright infringement in every case (in Oracle's opinion.)
- orangecat 6y ago
  Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. Which is amusing, because Sun almost certainly chose "max" in part for "compatibility" with the C standard library.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Scratch the "almost", the developer of java.lang.Math explicitly said in one of the briefs that he did it for exactly that reason.
webmaven 6y ago
> This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything. That also isn't how copyright works. You're essentially asserting copyright over the semantics of an API. The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright. That said, even if the un-synonymized API is protected by copyright (and I would generally argue otherwise), reimplementing it must be seen as fair use, all the more so an API with renamed functions. For a more recent example: Amazon's DocumentDB reimplements the MongoDB API. This should be allowed, even though we could wish Amazon had acted otherwise. Here is the crux of the matter: unless there is some sort of no-man's-land between the various intellectual property regimes for software, no interoperability will be allowed except that which a vendor explicitly opts into. If copyrights, trademarks, and patents overlap sufficiently, even clean-room reimplementations will be forbidden. We can argue about which aspects of software should be protected, for how long, and by what means, but at the end of the day there must be an unprotectable area of some kind, or we're all going to be doomed to either working entirely within vendors' vertically integrated stacks, or else implementing NSidedWheelAPIFactoryFactory() all the way down to bare metal for the foreseeable future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright. Wouldn't semantics be functional and thus require a utility patent, rather than a design patent or trade dress?
  - webmaven 6y ago
    Wouldn't semantics be functional and thus require a utility patent, rather than a design patent or trade dress? The argument being made by Google (and stipulated by Oracle) is that the reason Google copied the API was for its familiarity to developers, rather than any inherent quality or functionality. This is, essentially, a "look-and-feel" lawsuit, only applied to code, rather than UI.

by mantap 6y ago

jasode 6y ago

>If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming : [...] Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked." Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 976. [...] [1] don't know where the canonical source is so I provide a Google search link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s+%22java.lang.Math.max%22+example%2C+Oracle+explains+that+the+developers+could+have+called+it+any+number+of+things%2C https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s...

mantap 6y ago
If I take a book, say Harry Potter, and use a thesaurus to change words to their synonyms in the hopes of avoiding copyright, no court is going to agree that I can now publish Barry Otter and the Association of the Eagle as my own creation.
- angel_j 6y ago
  Hirsute Jugmaker, and the...
- Doddler 6y ago
  I don't know if that's true. At least it you wrote a story which is almost exactly like Harry Potter from scratch, without referencing the original and with none of the original characters, I don't believe this would be an issue under current copyright rules.
  - radford-neal 6y ago
    But you won't. I don't think the law cares about hypothetical occurrences that have probability less than 10^-100000000000.
  - tzs 6y ago
    That's true, but not relevant to the point of the comment you are replying to. Taking a copy of an existing work, and simply replacing words with synonyms and renaming characters would still count as copying. Maybe there would be enough creativity in your choice of synonyms to make your work separately copyrightable as a derivative work, but that would still require permission of the existing work's copyright owner. Producing a new work that happens to be similar to, or even word for word identical to an existing work, if you truly created it yourself from scratch without taking anything from the existing work, would not be copying. As a practical matter, unless you had extraordinary proof that you really had never read Harry Potter books, watched the movies, read the plot summaries on Wikipedia, attended a party shortly after one of the books came out where everyone was talking about it, you would lose in a copyright infringement lawsuit. If you work is very similar to Harry Potter and you had access to Harry Potter, that's sufficient for the plaintiff to make their case, switching the burden to you to prove that you did not copy it.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      A book is subject to veru different considerations - it has a plot, main characters, and other characteristics that you would be copying. All of these are a protected product of the author's creativity. There is no plot in an API, no main characters, etc. It communicates matters of technical nature, and there aren't five different way of writing 'sqrt()' or whatever. It is more appropriately compares to architechtural blueprints and other technical documents.
matthewdgreen 6y ago
My vague recollection of this case is that Oracle was kind of up a creek with the "java.lang.Math.max" argument, because max() itself is such a well-understood mathematical function and has been defined in numerous programming languages before Java. This put some constraints on Oracle, and thus "the name is the copyrightable contribution" became their (weak) argument. This does not necessarily mean that changing the function name (as opposed to calling interface and interface organization) would have been sufficient to avoid copyright infringement in every case (in Oracle's opinion.)
orangecat 6y ago
Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. Which is amusing, because Sun almost certainly chose "max" in part for "compatibility" with the C standard library.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Scratch the "almost", the developer of java.lang.Math explicitly said in one of the briefs that he did it for exactly that reason.

webmaven 6y ago

> This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything. That also isn't how copyright works. You're essentially asserting copyright over the semantics of an API. The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright. That said, even if the un-synonymized API is protected by copyright (and I would generally argue otherwise), reimplementing it must be seen as fair use, all the more so an API with renamed functions. For a more recent example: Amazon's DocumentDB reimplements the MongoDB API. This should be allowed, even though we could wish Amazon had acted otherwise. Here is the crux of the matter: unless there is some sort of no-man's-land between the various intellectual property regimes for software, no interoperability will be allowed except that which a vendor explicitly opts into. If copyrights, trademarks, and patents overlap sufficiently, even clean-room reimplementations will be forbidden. We can argue about which aspects of software should be protected, for how long, and by what means, but at the end of the day there must be an unprotectable area of some kind, or we're all going to be doomed to either working entirely within vendors' vertically integrated stacks, or else implementing NSidedWheelAPIFactoryFactory() all the way down to bare metal for the foreseeable future.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright. Wouldn't semantics be functional and thus require a utility patent, rather than a design patent or trade dress?
- webmaven 6y ago
  Wouldn't semantics be functional and thus require a utility patent, rather than a design patent or trade dress? The argument being made by Google (and stipulated by Oracle) is that the reason Google copied the API was for its familiarity to developers, rather than any inherent quality or functionality. This is, essentially, a "look-and-feel" lawsuit, only applied to code, rather than UI.