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> Nvidia can make things arbitrarily difficult both technically and legally Pretty sure APIs are not copyrightable, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecou
by Const-me 2y ago
> Nvidia can make things arbitrarily difficult both technically and legally
Pretty sure APIs are not copyrightable, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-956 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-956
> against the license agreement of cuDNN or cuBLAS to run them on this
They don’t run either of them, they instead implement an equivalent API on top of something else. Here’s a quote: “Open-source wrapper libraries providing the "CUDA-X" APIs by delegating to the corresponding ROCm libraries. This is how libraries such as cuBLAS and cuSOLVER are handled.”
- dralley 2y agoI believe it was decided that they are copyrightable but that using them for compatibility purposes is fair use.
- kbolino 2y agoNo, it's stranger than that: SCOTUS did not rule on copyrightability of APIs at all, but simply ruled that even if they are copyrightable, what Google did (completely reimplement Sun/Oracle's public API) was still fair use.
- mrandish 2y agoIt would have been nice to get a clear SCOTUS precedent on this. On the other hand, I also value a SCOTUS which rules minimally and narrowly by default (I also appreciate SCOTUS' return to stricter constitutional grounding in the past decade).
- hobs 2y agoIncredibly loud laughing from the lawyers whose study of law is being thrown around willy nilly because of all the unprecedented joke decisions they are making right now.
- kbolino 2y agoWe are stuck between a rock and a hard place politically. The real decisions should be coming from Congress not the courts. However, Congress is too disorganized and disconnected to answer the important questions, leaving the courts to either muddle along or else become semi-dictatorial. In most countries, this would cause a constitutional crisis, but the modern U.S. system seems to be a little too resilient to such otherwise concerning signals.
- hobs 2y agoWe're far past a constitutional crisis, and the courts taking power nobody wanted to give to them (who wasn't interested in a unitary executive at least) isn't a good solution.
- kbolino 2y agoWhat constitutional crisis has occurred that hasn't been resolved? Constitutional crises involve fundamental breaks in the working of government that bring two or more of its elements into direct conflict that can't be reconciled through the normal means. The last of these by my accounting was over desegregation, which was resolved with the President ordering the Army to force the recalcitrant states to comply. Before that was a showdown between the New Deal Congress and the Supreme Court, which the former won by credibly threatening to pack the latter (which is IMO a much less severe crisis but still more substantial than anything happening today). However, that was almost a century ago, and Congress has not been that coherent lately.
- ted_dunning 2y agoI would think the latest one where SCOTUS ruled that the president was a king except in matters where the SCOTUS decides they aren't counts as a constitutional crisis.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- not2b 2y agoThat is how the SC used to work: they would decide cases on the narrowest possible grounds. If they don't have to decide a tough question, but they can finesse it with something simpler, good enough. More recently they have been willing to tear up decades of established law on a regular basis.
- hnfong 2y ago"Used to work"... this was 2021. And generally courts/judges just choose the scope of their legal opinions based on how far reaching they want the legal principles to apply. IMHO, copyright-ability of APIs is so far away from their political agenda that they probably just decided to leave the issue on a cliffhanger...
- immibis 2y agoYes, "used to". Now, in 2024, the same supreme court has decided that presidents have immunity in all official acts, from stealing documents, up to and including assassination attempts on their opponents. This is a radical shift in how the court operates.
- kbolino 2y agoThis "opponent assassination" hypothetical gets bandied about a lot but I have not seen any evidence that any court considers that to be an "official act". Official acts are constrained to legitimate exercises of constitutional authority and are not merely anything a President (or especially, an ex-President) does.
- not2b 2y agoIt's specifically mentioned in the dissents.
- tiberious726 2y agoThe dissents, not the opinion
- consf 2y ago[dead]