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Oracle v. Google judge to decide whether APIs are Copyrightable, not the jury
- _delirium 15y agoThat seems correct: whether copyright law in principle covers copyright of APIs is a question of law rather than fact.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoAnd, more importantly, the judge is far more well-versed with both the tech and the law side of things to be in a position to make a more-informed and accurate ruling on the matter.
- jimmyvanhalen 14y agohttp://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403292,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403292,00.asp Under questioning from Oracle lawyer Michael Jacobs, Reinhold contended that "each page of the [Java] language specification includes a copyright notice," "Page, 39, testified over the course of two days, claiming that Google only used elements of the Java programming language that are freely available in the public domain. But after being admonished from the bench for evasive responses to Oracle questioning, the Google CEO finally admitted that his company never obtained a license to use Java code in its own software."
- icebraining 14y agoHaving a copyright notice does not mean it's copyrighted, though. Rural Telephone Service Co. probably had a copyright notice in their listings too, but the court still found it uncopyrightable.
- chc 14y agoIf Google were publishing copies of that specification, that would be relevant.
- ajross 15y agoI'm not sure it's actually supposed to be surprising that the Judge came down on this side. The whole point of the Judge/Jury separation is that one gets to decide matters of law and the other matters of fact. Clearly whether or not the doctrine of copyright extends to the expression of an API is not a fact being contested here. The more amusing bit is that the incriminating code snipped in Oracle's slides goes the other way: the code is in Java because Josh Bloch (the Google employee who checked it into Android) wrote it in the first place and gave it to Sun. So the same TimSort implementation got carried with him into Android. There may still be a copyright question if he actually assigned ownership to Sun, I guess. But suing the author over the use of open source code he gave you in another open source project is... yeah.
- jdq 14y ago"...Josh Bloch (the Google employee who checked it into Android) wrote it in the first place and gave it to Sun." What does that mean exactly--'gave it to Sun'? He was a Sun employee at the time. It's silly to say the Java code he wrote while working at Sun was given to Sun by him. Likewise, it's silly to say that then by extension when he went to work for Google he just took his code with him and gave it to Android.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- simoncion 14y agoFrom the fine article, it seems that the code in question is timsort, which Bloch wrote after he left Sun. He gave the code to Sun by pushing it into the OpenJDK.
- jimmyvanhalen 14y agoIn related news: Google-Sun court docs reveal long Java licensing dance For more than five years, Google sought to license Java or acquire rights to the language before Sun got into the hands of Oracle or IBM. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57417898-94/google-sun-court-docs-reveal-long-java-licensing-dance/?tag=mncol;editorPicks http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57417898-94/google-sun-cour...
- Nogwater 15y agoI'm surprised that copyrightability of APIs is still an open question in (US) law. Is that because people haven't copied each other's APIs before, or because when they did nobody cared about the legality?
- ajross 15y agoIt might be a bit of a stretch to say it's an open question. This is the first time (AFAIK) anyone has sued over it, so there's no case law. The closest equivalent in "big" cases is probably Lotus v. Borland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Intl,_Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int...). Basically, Lotus sued Borland because the menu layout of Quatro was identical to 1-2-3. They won initially, but ultimately lost in the Supreme Court. The judgement was that the mechanism for using a program was not a copyrightable form. Prior to this case, I guess everyone sane had assumed that an API was a basically equivalent mechanism (just one for a programmer instead of a user). But Oracle has the constitutional right to sue for what they believe they own, so there's no "short circuit" that would prevent the suit.
- TazeTSchnitzel 15y agoMight want to fix that link, there's a `'` in there.
- nitrogen 14y agoI thought that the copyrightability of APIs was a question in USL vs. BSDi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi). Am I mistaken?
- tonyjwang 14y agoIf settlement occurs before a judgment is passed down, then the court case doesn't bind future decisions.
- rbanffy 14y agoOr because nobody had so much to win as Oracle does now. And because nobody copied Larry Ellison's API until now.
- zmanji 15y agoI feel the judge will rule that APIs are not subject to copyright. There is no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical. I also think that if they are subject to copyright lots of people are going to get sued.
- Silhouette 14y agoThere is no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical. I disagree. Designing a good API is one of the most difficult skills to acquire in all of software development. If creating a good API were "fairly mechanical" then the world wouldn't be full of crappy ones, and we'd all rejoice permanently in the comforting glow that comes from writing code against an API written by someone who gets it. Despite this, I strongly believe that APIs should be excluded from copyright, for the same reason that I support the US exclusion of fonts. Some things are too important to general communication and creativity to allow any individual to have exclusive control over them, and they demonstrably can and will be created without needing that incentive to make them economically viable.
- fleitz 14y agoFor a good API I'd agree with you that it's a difficult skill to learn. In the case of java I would say that "no expression of creativity and it is fairly mechanical" is a fairly apt description.
- lucian1900 14y agoI don't even think they should be excluded because they're important, but simply because they are required for interoperability, which can never be made illegal anyway.
- josnyder 14y agoAPI design requires much skill and foresight. As you said: Designing a good API is one of the most difficult skills to acquire in all of software development. However, the yardstick for copyrightability remains creativity (among other things). Some tangible work that was formed by the "sweat of one's brow" is not necessarily copyrightable, unless it was done creatively by the sweat of one's brow. Feist v. Rural [1] is the common case to cite here, where it was decided that telephone books were not creative, and thus not copyrightable, despite the effort that went into creating them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
- IsaacL 15y agoOne thing that suprises me is how well the judge seems to grasp this rather technical issue.
- rayiner 15y agoJudge Alsup has a B.S. degree and apparently planned to be an engineer before he got interested in civil rights: http://www.fedbar.org/Resources_1/Judicial-Profiles/Judicial-PDFs/Alsup-profile.aspx?FT=.pdf http://www.fedbar.org/Resources_1/Judicial-Profiles/Judicial...
- keeperofdakeys 14y agoYou'd be surprised how well people can pick up on things if they have a reason to learn and a good explanation. Especially since most people "don't understand" because they don't want to learn.
- stordoff 14y agoNot all judges, lawyers etc. come from a non-technical background. I, for example, have a BA in Computer Science, but am currently studying for MA in Law. I imagine this is more common than people think.
- zissou 15y agoGoogle will have to display Android's relevance via the difference between implementing an API into a piece of software vs. the open and free use of an API's concept, which in this case is mostly a set of [37] "best practices" for a programming language. I suspect the latter is where Google will try and grab some ground in the copyright debate in the days to come.
- haberman 14y agoAs someone who obsesses over API design, it is interesting for me to reflect on why I don't consider APIs copyrightable, even though I have spent so much effort and creativity designing them. The issue makes the most sense to me when I think of APIs as communications protocols. Indeed APIs for remote services literally are communications protocols. But even for the in-process case an API is the means by which two decoupled pieces of code communicate. In this sense, APIs aren't that different from languages themselves. If you get really abstract, you could think of LISP as nothing but S-expression syntax and everything else (including define, lambda, etc) as an API. Languages themselves aren't copyrightable, even thought things you can say in a language are. Languages like Lojban certainly had a lot of creative design go into them, but that alone doesn't make them copyrightable. So even though I think you can make a pretty convincing philosophical argument for why APIs shouldn't be copyrightable, the critical deciding factor to me in is a practical one. Allowing APIs to be copyrightable would be a huge and unwarranted advantage to incumbents at the expense of innovation and disruptive technology. Users of any API would be locked in to one particular provider of that API. The ability to swap out one component for another is a fundamental tool for software engineers, and it's a fantastically pro-competitive check that keeps people honest. If your API provider BigCo raises their prices and no one else is allowed to compete with them because their API is copyrighted, how is that good for anyone except BigCo? In particular, someone else may have developed a superior way of implementing the API; allowing them to do so could help move the entire industry forward. Protecting BigCo from this disruption gives them no incentive to move their own tech forward; they can continue to coast on the vendor lock-in of their customers. We're not talking about letting others copy their product, but rather allowing others to speak the same language that everyone is currently speaking to BigCo. I agree with Joshua Bloch's sentiment that API design is "tough" and "a noble and rewarding craft," but I don't think either of these imply legally-protected status. I think it would be terrible for the industry if the judge ruled that APIs are copyrightable.