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I found this to be a better treatment of the subject: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-defends-copyrightability-of-apis.html http://fosspatents.bl

by timf 15y ago

I found this to be a better treatment of the subject: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-defends-copyrightability-of-apis.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-defends-copyr...

extension 15y ago
According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may very well be beautiful and unique, but are they really suggesting that Google cloned Java merely because they didn't want to take the time to come up with their own API and not because they wanted to interoperate with existing Java code and tools? Oracle points out that Google's Java is not 100% compatible, but so what? It's still compatible with a large subset of Java, and a large subset of tools and libraries do, in fact, work with Android unmodified. Is there not some aspect of copyright law that prevents these sorts of doomsday abuse scenarios e.g. someone copyrights the sound of breathing and we all choke to death? It seems to me that the extreme collatoral damage that would be caused by copyrightable APIs is, in itself, a silver bullet argument against it.
joe_the_user 15y ago
Ah, you mean Oracle shill Florian Mueller? Our "professional corporate communicator" certainly spends a lot of effort looking at these cases but his role in publicizing a a variety of bogus claims such as the various "Android violates the GPL" efforts inclines me to count my fingers and neurons after I read his blog.
- timf 15y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. But law does sometimes conflict with how we wish things were or how things should just obviously work, and I don't pretend to know any better on the specifics (I certainly hope that there is indeed a precedent that protects abstract APIs from being copyrighted). The guy did start the NoSoftwareParents campaign, so I don't know how much of an "Oracle shill" he could really be. Hard to really know, of course. http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/about/manager.html http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/about/manager.html
  - joe_the_user 15y ago
    Mueller is a lobbyist. IE, he has a long history of being to represent various positions not of which are necessarily consistent (he has represented coalitions of closed-source companies for example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_M%C3%BCller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_M%C3%BCller I'm not sure what is behind his current slant. However, I believe he created nosoftwareparents.com when he was working for MySQL. Oracle's acquisition of MySQL might be an explanation, here.

by timf 15y ago

extension 15y ago

According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may very well be beautiful and unique, but are they really suggesting that Google cloned Java merely because they didn't want to take the time to come up with their own API and not because they wanted to interoperate with existing Java code and tools? Oracle points out that Google's Java is not 100% compatible, but so what? It's still compatible with a large subset of Java, and a large subset of tools and libraries do, in fact, work with Android unmodified. Is there not some aspect of copyright law that prevents these sorts of doomsday abuse scenarios e.g. someone copyrights the sound of breathing and we all choke to death? It seems to me that the extreme collatoral damage that would be caused by copyrightable APIs is, in itself, a silver bullet argument against it.

joe_the_user 15y ago

Ah, you mean Oracle shill Florian Mueller? Our "professional corporate communicator" certainly spends a lot of effort looking at these cases but his role in publicizing a a variety of bogus claims such as the various "Android violates the GPL" efforts inclines me to count my fingers and neurons after I read his blog.

timf 15y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. But law does sometimes conflict with how we wish things were or how things should just obviously work, and I don't pretend to know any better on the specifics (I certainly hope that there is indeed a precedent that protects abstract APIs from being copyrighted). The guy did start the NoSoftwareParents campaign, so I don't know how much of an "Oracle shill" he could really be. Hard to really know, of course. http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/about/manager.html http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/about/manager.html
- joe_the_user 15y ago
  Mueller is a lobbyist. IE, he has a long history of being to represent various positions not of which are necessarily consistent (he has represented coalitions of closed-source companies for example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_M%C3%BCller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_M%C3%BCller I'm not sure what is behind his current slant. However, I believe he created nosoftwareparents.com when he was working for MySQL. Oracle's acquisition of MySQL might be an explanation, here.