8 ms·

Google’s copyright win against Oracle is in danger on appeal

40 points by shawndumas 13y ago

mik3y 13y ago
I'm really torn on the topic of API copyrightability, and watching this nervously. On one hand, haven't we all worked with (or built) APIs which seem remarkable in their structure and simplicity? The best of the best seem like unambiguously creative works. On the other hand, I don't want to work in a world where simply conforming to an interface specification could be illegal. What a nightmare that would be.
- ttflee 13y ago
  Perhaps by simply using a different set of metaphors and synonyms, it could be circumvented. However, thesauruses are hard. See http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/379566/don-t-go-programming-if-you-don-t-have-good-thesaurus http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/379566/don-t-go-progr...
- josephlord 13y ago
  Fair Use and or competition law could better balance the power than a lack of copyright-ability. The other thing is that it gives a incentive to avoid platforms that have liberal API licenses. Specifically in the Java case Google could I think have used the API under the GPL but chose not to.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    They chose not to because it would have made every single android app GPL too.
    - pron 13y ago
      I don't think so. OpenJDK's GPL has a "classpath exception", that does not require apps using the API to be GPL.
      - wmf 13y ago
        The real reason is probably that Android was developed before OpenJDK was released. That and carriers' irrational GPLphobia.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I don't see the big nightmare here. Copyrights aren't a "hidden landmine" issue like patents can be. It's not like you can accidentally copy an API, and even if you did, independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement. Being able to copyright APIs would just mean that everyone would be incentivized to switch to open-source APIs with clear licensing terms (BSD, GPL, etc). I don't see that as a bad thing.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    libeditline[1] is a BSD-licensed implementation of the GNU Readline[2] API. Do you think this should be considered copyright infringement? [1] http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/ http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/ [2] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html
  - pron 13y ago
    I think it could certainly pose a problem for existing projects; for new ones - probably not so much. Some API authors will encourage compatible implementations (as they do now), and some will compete on their own.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    BSD wouldn't exist if APIs were copyrightable in the 1980s/90s.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  That's the wrong way to view it. The proper way is: will copyrighting APIs help our society? Will software developers have more of an incentive to make better APIs (assuming those benefit the general public) because of copyright? Had there been strong copyrights, would Sun have made better date/time APIs? Would Microsoft not have ended up creating code that requires: String.Split(s, new char[] { ',' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries) To cut an unescaped CSV row? I can't see any positive difference in the world by copyrighting APIs.
  - mik3y 13y ago
    You're right; to be clear, I also strongly don't believe that APIs should be copyrightable. But I'm nervous that there are at least a few ways to make the argument, to a layperson (like a judge or jury), and that Oracle might succeed eventually.
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      That's because of the whole "intellectual property" concept. It moves the idea of copyright (and patents) from being an exception to free speech to being some sort of intrinsic fairness. Instead of looking at the tradeoffs with public interest, people start thinking things like "Well he did write it so he should control it. If he had made a chair instead of a poem, we wouldn't just steal the chair from him." In the process, the whole justification for IP is forgotten and we end up in bizarro world.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    That is a political argument against copyrightability though not a legal one. There is also the possibility of fair use arguments which probably could be decided by the court. Do remember that if you independently come up with the same API for a function without copying that is not infringement (copyright is not patents).
nly 13y ago
> By grabbing parts of APIs, Google took "the most important, the most appealing" parts of Java, Oracle's lawyer told a three-judge panel. ... this made me laugh. I find Javas APIs horrific and muddled. Surely not one of the "most appealing" parts?
- nl 13y ago
  They provide compatibility with the broard range of Java code and APIs. Of course they are the most appealing part.
- bsdetector 13y ago
  It's not that Java APIs are particularly good, but that they exist and are massive in scope. Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over it. If the appeal finds for Oracle I'll laugh... Google at least hastened Sun's demise by being too cheap to pay for Java, then they were too cheap to buy Sun when it was for sale. If they end up having to pay Oracle for it, that's karma at work.
  - nly 13y ago
    Google never wanted Java, they just want to tap in to one of the largest developer populations around. Licensing Java or buying Sun wasn't in their interests, and this has been proven in court.
  - haberman 13y ago
    > Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over it. And how much work did Tim Berners-Lee put into HTTP/HTML, the Unicode Consortium into Unicode, the W3C into XML, etc? The Java ecosystem depends heavily on these and many more. What kind of licensing agreement does Oracle have with the W3C? If you can own copyright on an API, I can't imagine what argument you would use to justify implementing a protocol without licensing it first. Some parts of the Java API implement APIs that others have designed. Should Oracle need a licensing agreement with the W3C to implement the DOM? Some parts of the Java API are thin wrappers around existing APIs. Is the Java API a derivative work of CORBA? Does Oracle need a licensing agreement with OMG?
electrichead 13y ago
However this goes, I will be sad to see the lack of coverage from groklaw that made the case so understandable last time.
- belgianguy 13y ago
  I miss it dearly, as I do miss PJ's apt but still readable analysis of complex lawsuits. It was especially powerful against paid shills or any other articles that valued money over facts. I always hoped it'd resume someday, or rise as a phoenix from its ashes. Where did the community go after the sign-off?
salient 13y ago
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is backing Oracle in this appeal, because apparently Microsoft thinks that copyright on APIs = good.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Perhaps, but it may be more narrow than that: Microsoft is backing Oracle because they think that any obstruction to Google momentum is good, and that copyright on APIs is either good, neutral, or bad but not bad enough to outweigh the benefit of the problems losing this case would cause Google in the short term.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  Of course they do. If APIs can be copyrighted, then projects like Wine and Mono become illegal.
  - micampe 13y ago
    Director of the open source technology centre at Microsoft Tom Hanrahan said the Community Promise allows projects like Mono to fully support its technology. “The type of action Oracle is taking against Google over Java is not going to happen,” Hanrahan said. Microsoft’s Community Promise has made the .Net runtime and C# specifications available to Miguel de Icaza and the Mono project developers. “If a .Net port to Android was through Mono it would fall under that agreement,” he said. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_stop_net_android/ http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_s... More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
    - jmillikin 13y ago
      Microsoft's "community promise" only covers APIs derived from the ECMA standards. It doesn't protect other APIs that Mono implements, such as ASP.NET.
      - micampe 13y ago
haberman 13y ago
I really strongly believe that APIs should not be copyrightable, and I say this as someone who has spent literally years of my life and creative energy designing APIs. I think designing APIs is an art, and I think it is creative. But ultimately I think APIs are much more like protocols, file formats, or languages than they are like fixed works. Copyright API documentation all you like, but the day that people can control who is allowed to speak a language that they invented is the day that you cede control of everything to incumbents. What if SCO could really have sued IBM on the basis that they owned the actual APIs to UNIX? What if you couldn't actually say "#define ENOENT 1" in your own project without violating SCO's copyrights?
- josephlord 13y ago
  SCO tried but everything had been permissively licensed or had not been properly treated when you still needed to apply copyright notices everywhere for copyright to apply. There is also the counteracting market force that single source illiberally licensed API's are unappealing to users so in many cases granting rights to other implementations can be commercially desirable for the creator of the API. Mono's existance encourages .Net and C# adoption. Also there is the distinction between copying an API to duplicate it and USING the API to develop a program against (this would the speaking a language aspect). I would argue that using the API would never be infringement but would in all circumstances I could imagine would be fair use.
scovetta 13y ago
Oracle's "fan base"? Only a lawyer...
- erbo 13y ago
  Not to mention that it wouldn't have been Oracle's fan base, but Sun's fan base. Android 1.0 was released in September 2008. Oracle bought Sun in April 2009. Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place...
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    > Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place... Yes they would, but were out of money. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-james-gosling-google-totally-slimed-sun/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-ja... "Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade."
- nimble 13y ago
  Over 3 billion devices run java
cma 13y ago
Oracle has a reliance on uncopyrightable APIs. If these copyrights were enforced, they would would have to radically change their SQL semantics to avoid infringing "copyrighted" APIs from prior SQL databases. They have also taken APIs from free software and written proprietary implementations. They would need to release entire huge projects under GPL.
- jlarocco 13y ago
  I don't think either of those things are true. First, SQL is a standardized language. It's not copyrighted, and has an ISO standard. Anybody can implement a SQL database and not run into any copyright problems. They might run into problems if they implemented proprietary Oracle extensions in their new DB, but even that seems unlikely. Next, even if APIs are copyrightable, it doesn't imply Oracle would have to release anything as open source. For one, I'm not sure any open source projects would sue over it. And even if they did, Oracle could simply stop distributing the software.
  - cma 13y ago
    >First, SQL is a standardized language. It's not copyrighted, and has an ISO standard. Pre-standard implementations had copyrights. Under this ruling the standard itself would violate those. There might be some sort of promissory estoppel type thing if all of the owners of the implementations also participated in the standardization process. In the US post-1978 works don't even have to be registered to receive copyright protection--good luck tracking every significant bit of API lineage down and not getting hit by a troll that acquired the assets of some dinky company.
  - haberman 13y ago
    > SQL is a standardized language What does being standardized have to do with it? MP3 and h.264 are standardized, that doesn't prevent them from being heavily patented. Likewise being standardized wouldn't prevent an API from being copyrighted. > It's not copyrighted If APIs were copyrightable, they would automatically be copyrighted when they were written down in a fixed form. That's the way that copyright works; you don't have to take special action to copyright something, it is automatically copyrighted when you create it. Registering a copyright puts you in a stronger position legally but it is not required to actually have a copyright. See the danger now? If APIs were copyrightable, every API would automatically be copyrighted. Implementing an existing API would be copyright infringement unless you had a license.
gaius 13y ago
You're all talking as if Google are the good guys here. Whoever wins, we all lose.
- wmf 13y ago
  Why? Is Android so bad?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    No, but Google just played a Microsoft card and took advantage that Sun was too weak financially to sue them as they did with Microsoft.
michaelwww 13y ago
This will only accelerate the development of Dart by Google and push it onto the Android platform.
smnrchrds 13y ago
I thought Sun released most of Java code under open-source licenses years ago[1]. Are there key parts of Java which are closed-source and only those parts are disputed? If that's the case it shouldn't be very hard to replace those parts. I'm not familiar with the Java ecosystem. I appreciate if you could correct me. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html
- comex 13y ago
  It's released under GPL, and Google is trying to avoid putting GPL in userland.
jfoster 13y ago
This is interesting. I think there will be a lot of fallout if they find that APIs are copyrightable. Until now, I think the industry has been acting as though APIs are not copyrightable. The next question will be what actually constitutes an API? For example, are Unix programs like "mv" and "grep" parts of an API?
hypster 13y ago
Sounds like some jurisprudential butterfly chasing. I'm inclined to think Alsup's basis of "sequence, structure, and organization" not being copyrightable is far too broad a change, with ramifications beyond this specific case. (This is what allows lists, like a phone book, to be copyrightable, even though the numbers are public). I'd have thought the reverse engineering exceptions were a more apt basis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality However, that's where Oracle's argument about the "fan-base" comes in: it wasn't purely interoperability between machines that Google wanted, but the installed base of developers. I haven't followed the exact policy considerations for reverse engineering, but it seems to me that the training of engineers to work on a particular machine is part-and-parcel of interoperability (for example, third-party after-market car parts - not only do they fit, but mechanics already know how to fit them; a more relevant example is IBM mainframes/minicomputers being copied, where programmers already knew the platform). So, the higher court's consideration of the bigger picture may have serious financial consequences for Google and Oracle. I think Oracle will still lose, just on a different basis. It's good to be appellate judge.
iand 13y ago
My recollection was that the judge in this case pursued a very clever strategy. There were two questions to be decided: are APIs copyrightable and did Google infringe. The jury were asked to assume the API was copyrighted and then decide whether Google infringed that copyright. The jury found no infringement. Then the judge ruled that APIs were not copyrightable. So even if the judge's decision is overturned the jury's decision still stands and there was no infringement.
- Oletros 13y ago
  The jury found that there was infringement.
  - iand 13y ago
    In don't believe it did. https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/3--10-cv-03561/Oracle_America_Inc._v._Google_Inc./1190/ https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
    - Oletros 13y ago
      You have linked to the PATENT ruling, not the COPYRIGHT ruling http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form-in-oracle-google http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form-in-...

40 points by shawndumas 13y ago

mik3y 13y ago

I'm really torn on the topic of API copyrightability, and watching this nervously. On one hand, haven't we all worked with (or built) APIs which seem remarkable in their structure and simplicity? The best of the best seem like unambiguously creative works. On the other hand, I don't want to work in a world where simply conforming to an interface specification could be illegal. What a nightmare that would be.

ttflee 13y ago
Perhaps by simply using a different set of metaphors and synonyms, it could be circumvented. However, thesauruses are hard. See http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/379566/don-t-go-programming-if-you-don-t-have-good-thesaurus http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/379566/don-t-go-progr...
josephlord 13y ago
Fair Use and or competition law could better balance the power than a lack of copyright-ability. The other thing is that it gives a incentive to avoid platforms that have liberal API licenses. Specifically in the Java case Google could I think have used the API under the GPL but chose not to.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  They chose not to because it would have made every single android app GPL too.
  - pron 13y ago
    I don't think so. OpenJDK's GPL has a "classpath exception", that does not require apps using the API to be GPL.
    - wmf 13y ago
      The real reason is probably that Android was developed before OpenJDK was released. That and carriers' irrational GPLphobia.
rayiner 13y ago
I don't see the big nightmare here. Copyrights aren't a "hidden landmine" issue like patents can be. It's not like you can accidentally copy an API, and even if you did, independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement. Being able to copyright APIs would just mean that everyone would be incentivized to switch to open-source APIs with clear licensing terms (BSD, GPL, etc). I don't see that as a bad thing.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  libeditline[1] is a BSD-licensed implementation of the GNU Readline[2] API. Do you think this should be considered copyright infringement? [1] http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/ http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/editline/ [2] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html
- pron 13y ago
  I think it could certainly pose a problem for existing projects; for new ones - probably not so much. Some API authors will encourage compatible implementations (as they do now), and some will compete on their own.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  BSD wouldn't exist if APIs were copyrightable in the 1980s/90s.
MichaelGG 13y ago
That's the wrong way to view it. The proper way is: will copyrighting APIs help our society? Will software developers have more of an incentive to make better APIs (assuming those benefit the general public) because of copyright? Had there been strong copyrights, would Sun have made better date/time APIs? Would Microsoft not have ended up creating code that requires: String.Split(s, new char[] { ',' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries) To cut an unescaped CSV row? I can't see any positive difference in the world by copyrighting APIs.
- mik3y 13y ago
  You're right; to be clear, I also strongly don't believe that APIs should be copyrightable. But I'm nervous that there are at least a few ways to make the argument, to a layperson (like a judge or jury), and that Oracle might succeed eventually.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    That's because of the whole "intellectual property" concept. It moves the idea of copyright (and patents) from being an exception to free speech to being some sort of intrinsic fairness. Instead of looking at the tradeoffs with public interest, people start thinking things like "Well he did write it so he should control it. If he had made a chair instead of a poem, we wouldn't just steal the chair from him." In the process, the whole justification for IP is forgotten and we end up in bizarro world.
- josephlord 13y ago
  That is a political argument against copyrightability though not a legal one. There is also the possibility of fair use arguments which probably could be decided by the court. Do remember that if you independently come up with the same API for a function without copying that is not infringement (copyright is not patents).

nly 13y ago

> By grabbing parts of APIs, Google took "the most important, the most appealing" parts of Java, Oracle's lawyer told a three-judge panel. ... this made me laugh. I find Javas APIs horrific and muddled. Surely not one of the "most appealing" parts?

nl 13y ago
They provide compatibility with the broard range of Java code and APIs. Of course they are the most appealing part.
bsdetector 13y ago
It's not that Java APIs are particularly good, but that they exist and are massive in scope. Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over it. If the appeal finds for Oracle I'll laugh... Google at least hastened Sun's demise by being too cheap to pay for Java, then they were too cheap to buy Sun when it was for sale. If they end up having to pay Oracle for it, that's karma at work.
- nly 13y ago
  Google never wanted Java, they just want to tap in to one of the largest developer populations around. Licensing Java or buying Sun wasn't in their interests, and this has been proven in court.
- haberman 13y ago
  > Sun put a ton of work into designing and documenting these APIs, and morally speaking they should be compensated by having some kind of ownership over it. And how much work did Tim Berners-Lee put into HTTP/HTML, the Unicode Consortium into Unicode, the W3C into XML, etc? The Java ecosystem depends heavily on these and many more. What kind of licensing agreement does Oracle have with the W3C? If you can own copyright on an API, I can't imagine what argument you would use to justify implementing a protocol without licensing it first. Some parts of the Java API implement APIs that others have designed. Should Oracle need a licensing agreement with the W3C to implement the DOM? Some parts of the Java API are thin wrappers around existing APIs. Is the Java API a derivative work of CORBA? Does Oracle need a licensing agreement with OMG?

electrichead 13y ago

However this goes, I will be sad to see the lack of coverage from groklaw that made the case so understandable last time.

belgianguy 13y ago
I miss it dearly, as I do miss PJ's apt but still readable analysis of complex lawsuits. It was especially powerful against paid shills or any other articles that valued money over facts. I always hoped it'd resume someday, or rise as a phoenix from its ashes. Where did the community go after the sign-off?

salient 13y ago

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is backing Oracle in this appeal, because apparently Microsoft thinks that copyright on APIs = good.

dragonwriter 13y ago
Perhaps, but it may be more narrow than that: Microsoft is backing Oracle because they think that any obstruction to Google momentum is good, and that copyright on APIs is either good, neutral, or bad but not bad enough to outweigh the benefit of the problems losing this case would cause Google in the short term.
jmillikin 13y ago
Of course they do. If APIs can be copyrighted, then projects like Wine and Mono become illegal.
- micampe 13y ago
  Director of the open source technology centre at Microsoft Tom Hanrahan said the Community Promise allows projects like Mono to fully support its technology. “The type of action Oracle is taking against Google over Java is not going to happen,” Hanrahan said. Microsoft’s Community Promise has made the .Net runtime and C# specifications available to Miguel de Icaza and the Mono project developers. “If a .Net port to Android was through Mono it would fall under that agreement,” he said. http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_stop_net_android/ http://www.techworld.com.au/article/358564/microsoft_won_t_s... More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    Microsoft's "community promise" only covers APIs derived from the ECMA standards. It doesn't protect other APIs that Mono implements, such as ASP.NET.
    - micampe 13y ago

haberman 13y ago

I really strongly believe that APIs should not be copyrightable, and I say this as someone who has spent literally years of my life and creative energy designing APIs. I think designing APIs is an art, and I think it is creative. But ultimately I think APIs are much more like protocols, file formats, or languages than they are like fixed works. Copyright API documentation all you like, but the day that people can control who is allowed to speak a language that they invented is the day that you cede control of everything to incumbents. What if SCO could really have sued IBM on the basis that they owned the actual APIs to UNIX? What if you couldn't actually say "#define ENOENT 1" in your own project without violating SCO's copyrights?

josephlord 13y ago
SCO tried but everything had been permissively licensed or had not been properly treated when you still needed to apply copyright notices everywhere for copyright to apply. There is also the counteracting market force that single source illiberally licensed API's are unappealing to users so in many cases granting rights to other implementations can be commercially desirable for the creator of the API. Mono's existance encourages .Net and C# adoption. Also there is the distinction between copying an API to duplicate it and USING the API to develop a program against (this would the speaking a language aspect). I would argue that using the API would never be infringement but would in all circumstances I could imagine would be fair use.

scovetta 13y ago

Oracle's "fan base"? Only a lawyer...

erbo 13y ago
Not to mention that it wouldn't have been Oracle's fan base, but Sun's fan base. Android 1.0 was released in September 2008. Oracle bought Sun in April 2009. Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place...
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > Of course, Sun wouldn't have sued in the first place... Yes they would, but were out of money. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-james-gosling-google-totally-slimed-sun/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-ja... "Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade."
nimble 13y ago
Over 3 billion devices run java

cma 13y ago

Oracle has a reliance on uncopyrightable APIs. If these copyrights were enforced, they would would have to radically change their SQL semantics to avoid infringing "copyrighted" APIs from prior SQL databases. They have also taken APIs from free software and written proprietary implementations. They would need to release entire huge projects under GPL.

jlarocco 13y ago
I don't think either of those things are true. First, SQL is a standardized language. It's not copyrighted, and has an ISO standard. Anybody can implement a SQL database and not run into any copyright problems. They might run into problems if they implemented proprietary Oracle extensions in their new DB, but even that seems unlikely. Next, even if APIs are copyrightable, it doesn't imply Oracle would have to release anything as open source. For one, I'm not sure any open source projects would sue over it. And even if they did, Oracle could simply stop distributing the software.
- cma 13y ago
  >First, SQL is a standardized language. It's not copyrighted, and has an ISO standard. Pre-standard implementations had copyrights. Under this ruling the standard itself would violate those. There might be some sort of promissory estoppel type thing if all of the owners of the implementations also participated in the standardization process. In the US post-1978 works don't even have to be registered to receive copyright protection--good luck tracking every significant bit of API lineage down and not getting hit by a troll that acquired the assets of some dinky company.
- haberman 13y ago
  > SQL is a standardized language What does being standardized have to do with it? MP3 and h.264 are standardized, that doesn't prevent them from being heavily patented. Likewise being standardized wouldn't prevent an API from being copyrighted. > It's not copyrighted If APIs were copyrightable, they would automatically be copyrighted when they were written down in a fixed form. That's the way that copyright works; you don't have to take special action to copyright something, it is automatically copyrighted when you create it. Registering a copyright puts you in a stronger position legally but it is not required to actually have a copyright. See the danger now? If APIs were copyrightable, every API would automatically be copyrighted. Implementing an existing API would be copyright infringement unless you had a license.

gaius 13y ago

You're all talking as if Google are the good guys here. Whoever wins, we all lose.

wmf 13y ago
Why? Is Android so bad?
- pjmlp 13y ago
  No, but Google just played a Microsoft card and took advantage that Sun was too weak financially to sue them as they did with Microsoft.

michaelwww 13y ago

This will only accelerate the development of Dart by Google and push it onto the Android platform.

smnrchrds 13y ago

I thought Sun released most of Java code under open-source licenses years ago[1]. Are there key parts of Java which are closed-source and only those parts are disputed? If that's the case it shouldn't be very hard to replace those parts. I'm not familiar with the Java ecosystem. I appreciate if you could correct me. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

comex 13y ago
It's released under GPL, and Google is trying to avoid putting GPL in userland.

jfoster 13y ago

This is interesting. I think there will be a lot of fallout if they find that APIs are copyrightable. Until now, I think the industry has been acting as though APIs are not copyrightable. The next question will be what actually constitutes an API? For example, are Unix programs like "mv" and "grep" parts of an API?

hypster 13y ago

Sounds like some jurisprudential butterfly chasing. I'm inclined to think Alsup's basis of "sequence, structure, and organization" not being copyrightable is far too broad a change, with ramifications beyond this specific case. (This is what allows lists, like a phone book, to be copyrightable, even though the numbers are public). I'd have thought the reverse engineering exceptions were a more apt basis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality However, that's where Oracle's argument about the "fan-base" comes in: it wasn't purely interoperability between machines that Google wanted, but the installed base of developers. I haven't followed the exact policy considerations for reverse engineering, but it seems to me that the training of engineers to work on a particular machine is part-and-parcel of interoperability (for example, third-party after-market car parts - not only do they fit, but mechanics already know how to fit them; a more relevant example is IBM mainframes/minicomputers being copied, where programmers already knew the platform). So, the higher court's consideration of the bigger picture may have serious financial consequences for Google and Oracle. I think Oracle will still lose, just on a different basis. It's good to be appellate judge.

iand 13y ago

My recollection was that the judge in this case pursued a very clever strategy. There were two questions to be decided: are APIs copyrightable and did Google infringe. The jury were asked to assume the API was copyrighted and then decide whether Google infringed that copyright. The jury found no infringement. Then the judge ruled that APIs were not copyrightable. So even if the judge's decision is overturned the jury's decision still stands and there was no infringement.

Oletros 13y ago
The jury found that there was infringement.
- iand 13y ago
  In don't believe it did. https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/3--10-cv-03561/Oracle_America_Inc._v._Google_Inc./1190/ https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
  - Oletros 13y ago
    You have linked to the PATENT ruling, not the COPYRIGHT ruling http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form-in-oracle-google http://es.scribd.com/doc/92725855/completed-verdict-form-in-...