Judge Blasts Oracle's Attempt To Overturn Pro-Google Jury Verdict (arstechnica.com) 106
Joe Mullin, reporting for Ars Technica: Google successfully made its case to a jury last month that its use of Java APIs in Android was "fair use," and the verdict rejected Oracle's claim that the mobile system infringed its copyrights. After Google argued its case, though, Oracle filed a motion arguing that the judge should decide as a matter of law that fair use didn't cover it. In the wake of the jury's pro-Google verdict, Oracle's motion was its last hope of a trial victory. It didn't happen; US District Judge William Alsup shot down the motion on Wednesday. The same order also denied Google's motion making similar arguments, filed at the close of trial but before the jury's verdict. Alsup's stinging order [PDF], which rejects Oracle's argument [PDF] on every front, hardly comes as a surprise. But the document provides the first insights as to what Oracle might bring up in an appeal proceeding, which the company has said it will pursue. In the order, Alsup defends how he ran the trial. The evidence and instructions presented to the jury were a mix of mandates from the appeals court, which overruled Alsup on the key issue of API copyrightability, and modifications urged by both sides' lawyers.
Who are we rooting for today? (Score:2, Insightful)
I forgot, is it Google or Oracle? Which multi-billion dollar corporation needs our sympathy, cheers, and support today?
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more of an Aliens vs. Predator situation. Whoever wins, we lose.
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Never Oracle.
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle is never on the side of right. This is so true that if they do something that you thought was right, you should think again and try to decide whether they are being deceitful, or whether you were wrong to thing it was the right thing to do.
Google is sometimes a good guy. You can't use their actions as any guide to what proper behavior is. So they are less trustworthy than Oracle.
True. Mod parent up! (Score:1)
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:4, Funny)
If you find yourself thinking Oracle is as right as a stopped clock, (twice a day) just remember to check the fine print. It probably really means you pay double.
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Seriously... Why bother thinking about the importance of what was being argued/judged? Lets hang our hats on corporate entities and pretend that either of them care about us. If these were two much smaller companies, the importance would be the same...
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about which one of them cares about us, but rather being pragmatic. There are many situations in which the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Oracle is successful in its claims that APIs can be locked down, there's a world of hurt coming in the US, as any organization or individual that has replicated the function call list of any library (including kernels) could be viewed as having infringed on the original creator of that API. By that I mean just the call list and/or symbol tables, not any actual code.
In this case, Google is fighting an important fight that we should all hope it is successful in. Tomorrow it could be fighting a fight we disagree with.
To simply mindlessly support a company is the worst kind of fanboism, as mindlessly attacking a company's every move is just pointless contrarianism. Even Microsoft fights some fights I agree with, even if I think Redmond is run by some of the most loathsome individuals in the tech history.
Oracle, sadly, is a company whose positions almost always seem to fly in the face of reason, ethics and fair play, but it's at least theoretically possible that some day they may be on the right side of a battle. I dunno, maybe they don't like North Carolina gender bathroom laws or something.
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I was being sarcastic, and failed at it... To put it more directly: Root for the outcome not the company. Personally I side with Google in this, like I sided with IBM in IBM v SCO. I still wonder if there is a Ballmer connection in the back rooms to encourage these actions and put FUD back into open source, only this time against Android. However they already lost the battle, MS has no phone/mobile OS. But that too is just greed, which I believe is the single entity which motivates Oracle.
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:5, Informative)
Whichever one happens to be on the side of sanity.
In this case, Google was arguing that an API shouldn't be copyrightable. For anyone who understands what an API is, this makes total sense.
If I want to make an after-market alternator for a Honda car, I can do so by creating my own device that has the right size pulley, screw threads, electrical output, and so on. This absolutely is "fair use." In the same way, the API is the spec for the functionality behind it. I should be able to make an after-market part that meets those specs, without infringing on any copyrights.
Because Google was on the right side of the issue, I root for Google in this case. But if the roles were reversed, I would root for Oracle just as quickly.
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I understand APIs, I've designed them and I believe they are copyright worthy independently from implementation.
Most of the world disagrees with you, as do I, and this judge, and Google, and ... well, you get my point.
Good API design is hard work, requires expertise to do it, is not trivial and does guide implementation.
Partly true, and completely beside the point.
Implementation is guided only so far as what the input and output (and possibly effect) should be.
As long as the specific piece is not completely trivial (thus negating all of your points by definition) then the implementation need not at all be guided.
So SQL and Prolog code isn't copyright worthy either, cause you only define sets and sentences and the actual algorithm it is inferred by a runtime environment? Defining output, input and effect does indeed guide the implementation in a way no functional requirement would. Your last quote is a non sequitur because I never trivialized implementation I just pointed out that API design is not trivial.
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Sweat of the brow [wikipedia.org] was rejected in the US as a criteria for copyright.
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Good API design is hard work, requires expertise to do it, is not trivial and does guide implementation.
None of which is a reason for something to be copyrightable! If hard work alone were copyrightable, every ditch digger in the world would be owed royalties from every ditch they've dug. If requires-expertise made something copyrightable, then I should be able to claim copyright on Poe's "The Raven" because I can recite it from memory. If guides-implementation made something copyrightable, then again, those ditch diggers should get royalties from the plumbers who laid pipe in those ditches.
In the case of des
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If Oracle claimed that water flowed downhill, I would lose my faith in physics.
We're rooting against Evil (Score:2, Insightful)
We're rooting for technological progress, so that means that everyone has to root for APIs to not be granted exclusive monopolies by the government. That means you should be on Google's side and it doesn't matter if either side happens to be rich.
What Oracle is doing seems dangerous to me. The last they they should want are judges (or anyone else) thinking about this. Asking judges to reconsider Fair Use is a very bad idea, because the more someone understands the issue, the more likely that they'll realiz
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No one is saying that using an API is copyright violation, but this was never the issue.
I suspect Oracle not getting any money is your main problem with this? They used the patronising, emotional bullshit approach and it backfired spectacularly. lol.
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I was rooting for the inability to copyright functional aspects of a thing, such as the round shape of a wheel, the + in a phillips head screw, the + in a phillips head screwdriver, or the operation of the screwdriver on the screw, which we define here bool tighten(PhillipsScrew screw); bool loosen(PhillipsScrew screw); implements IAnythingCanBeAHammer { bool hit(Nail nail); }.
Sadly thats not what we got our ruling on, probably because a ruling that interfaces are functional and not creative would upset a
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:4, Informative)
Everything after "probably because..." is wrong. In fact, Google did argue that interfaces are functional and not creative, and prevailed in that argument -- in the previous trial. Then Oracle appealed, and the appeals court stupidly overturned it and then sent the case back to the lower court. This trial was forced to be conducted around the assumption that interfaces are creative.
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The ruling was on the basis of existing law. APIs are creative works that are fixed in a tangible form, and are therefore copyrightable. An API is not purely functional when it's created, since there's typically many ways to make one. Asking for a different court ruling is asking for judicial activism. Writing to your representatives in Congress and telling them why APIs should not be copyrightable would be much more productive.
The idea that APIs are copyrightable, but may be used as we normally use
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I forgot, is it Google or Oracle? Which multi-billion dollar corporation needs our sympathy, cheers, and support today?
Who ever roots for Oracle? Oh, that'd be that One Rich Asshole CEO Larry Ellison.
Re:Who are we rooting for today? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google doesn't need our sympathy--Oracle needs our antipathy. The people behind Oracles side of the case are sociopaths attempting to do something that will set a precedent that is extremely negative for technological progress in American society. Once set, it could extend beyond the country as part of our continual series of copyright treaties, making Oracle responsible for doing serious damage to human society as a whole. They're monsters who should be locked up.
Nobody seriously should care whether Google has to pay a million or even a billion dollars to some company, but they should care about the dangerous precedent Oracle was trying to set.
I was kinda hoping Oracle would win (Score:2)
I see it as similar to the Chinese artificial islands thing. You can argue and fight with the idiot for decades about why he's wrong and shouldn't do what he's trying to do, or you can just let him have hi
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Oracle seems to be less innovative than Google. Let's root for Google.
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Yes... Hillary Clinton clearly fights the slings and arrows of corporate influence to be a protector of us citizens from copyright extension.
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Both are ruled by Republicans.
Oh yeah, especially that evil Google is putting its weight [slashdot.org] to let Trump win.
Copyrighting APIs (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never heard of a stupider idea. How about I think about all the functionality that could be implemented by someone somewhere, then write these extremely easy one line expectations. I'll make a huge number of them as well such that all the arguments you'd expect to pass in for that type of functionality are covered.
Now that I've claimed copyright, the ability of a random person to use program a computer to do something useful has been taken away from them. That, and I barely had to do any actual work. The functionality hasn't even been implemented. Isn't the US legal system great?
Re:Copyrighting APIs (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with your premise - read the judgement. It's actually pretty impressive. The judge clearly took the time to learn some programming and some java. It's a very well thought out, and clearly well informed judgement. For a judge to dive this deeply into the issue gives me some hope for some of the other idiocy of the legal framework around software.
Re:Copyrighting APIs (Score:5, Interesting)
This judgement is from the judge that previously ruled that APIs were not copyrightable. It's the incompetent appeals court who made the fucked-up ruling.
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http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/... [oreilly.com]
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The judge spends several pages explaining why APIs should be fair use. He explains that textbooks reproduce exactly the same APIs. He says that if someone tried to
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That's an unfortunate analogy. It would be more like using a typewriter where the keys are in the Cryillic alphabet.
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No, clean room wouldn't have made a difference. Google in fact was found to not infringe on any of the "implementation code", it was the declarations that were found by the appeals court to infringe. There is no way to write those declarations another way without changing the API, so a clean room would not give any different result. It was the API itself that was found to be protected, so no matter how you try to do it, the information needed by the clean room is "dirty". A clean room implementation is
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Google in fact was found to not infringe on any of the "implementation code",
That's not true actually, they were found (by the jury) to have infringed on the rangeCheck code, and the appellate court let the finding stand. The clean room technique ensures that you only copy the bare minimum to reach your purpose, which is an important consideration under factor number three of fair use.
What about the other fair use factors? 1, 2 and 4? For example, with fair-use factor number 1, Google's use was for-profit, whereas most open source projects are not. Google's use also wasn't for pu
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True, they did accidentally copy one method, and Oracle agreed to accept $0 in damages.
Clean room is how you avoid infringement entirely, in which case fair use isn't even brought up. In this case, the CAFC made the whole process of clean room implementation impossible anyway.
Google is indeed for profit, however giving away the code (including source code) at no cost isn't particularly indicative of commercial use and exploitation. A company donating money to education can deduct it from their taxes even
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The total amount that was actually used from Oracle's API code was very tiny, less than 0.2%,
The size is mostly irrelevant though. In one case (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises) someone copied 400 words out of a 200,000 word book (the supreme court ruled against them). As one judge said, "you can't escape guilt by showing how much you didn't copy." You have to look at the importance of the copying, and whether they used more than necessary for the purpose.
Google's use was also transformative. They selected out a useful subset of the Java API, rewrote all of the actual implementation and documentation (97% of the code), then wrote a whole lot more more new APIs
That's not really what is
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The size is mostly irrelevant though. In one case (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises) someone copied 400 words out of a 200,000 word book (the supreme court ruled against them). As one judge said, "you can't escape guilt by showing how much you didn't copy." You have to look at the importance of the copying, and whether they used more than necessary for the purpose.
As a general principle, yes, but all the factors are weighed. It was the same percentage, but it was stand-alone paragraphs and sentences, not scattered individual names that don't stand on their own. They also were a much larger portion of the infringing work, it was not functional, it wasn't yet published, it reduced demand for the original.
That's not really what is meant by transformative. Here Google's approach was to say, "Before we did this, Java couldn't be used on mobile. We created a new work that allowed people to use Java on mobile." Oracle's counter-argument was to show phones that did have J2SE on mobile (SavaJe, Blackberry).
Oracle wouldn't allow Google to license JavaSE for a phone.
It was transformative because they created entirely new implementation code, and used the existing API in
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They also were a much larger portion of the infringing work, it was not functional........etc
You are misunderstanding the fair-use factor 3, the amount copied. That isn't a positive defense, at best it is neutral: Google can say "We copied no more than necessary." But Oracle will try to argue that they did copy more than necessary.
The actual expression (the source code) doesn't lose protection unless there's merger - which was the case here
No, that was Google's idea, but the appellate court explained why it is wrong, see here starting on page 30 [eff.org]. In brief, when considering merger for copyright protection, you need to consider the options available to Sun when they originally wrote Java: there were plenty of
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You are misunderstanding the fair-use factor 3, the amount copied. That isn't a positive defense, at best it is neutral: Google can say "We copied no more than necessary." But Oracle will try to argue that they did copy more than necessary.
None of them are positive defenses. All are factors that weigh more or less in favor of fair use or against it. They are also not exhaustive, the jury can use other factors as well. Read the jury instructions [arstechnica.net].
Amount used (in comparison to the infringed work) is an important factor. The amount of copied material compared to the rest of the infringing work is also a factor, it goes to "the purpose and character of use" - if most of your work is just copied material, it weight against fair use. In Sega, t
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The CAFC confused merger with scènes à faire.
I don't think so lol. Now you're just saying stupid stuff. Take a nap, think on it, and come back tomorrow with a fresh mind.
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Question: how many times has the Standard C Library API been implemented? How many different implementations?
Another thought . . .
Who owns the copyright on the API to the Standard C Library? Oh, wait. He's dead Jim.
But did he assign the copyright rights to anyone? Nope. Why? Because at that time nobody ever believe we would live in a world insane enough for anyone to even hint that copyright should appl
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You have to prove that the accused actually did wilful act of copying the copyrighted material (or at least accuse can to disprove it). If accused can prove that they came up with it completely on their own they are not infringing a copyright. Which can be easily done by sharing a git log of a particular software project showing from start to end one wrote the entire thing and its evolution to its current form (if it indeed was developed in house and completel
Is Oracle using SCO's law firm? (Score:1)
"On October 1, 2028, following the judge in the case ruling against the last remaining claims, Oracle's suit against Alphabet(formerly Google) was dismissed with prejudice; Oracle then filed an appeal later that month"
Re:Is Oracle using SCO's law firm? (Score:5, Informative)
Is Oracle using SCO's law firm?
Yes, actually, Same law firm [wikipedia.org].
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There are several judges involved in the SCO litigation, none of them Judge Alsup. It's not even the same Circuit.
Alsup is Ninth Circuit in California, SCO v IBM and Novell are in Tenth Circuit in Utah.
Cutting through the legal muckety-muck (Score:2)
At the core of the argument is the irreducibility problem. APIs combine high-level wrappers around functional pre-requisites dictated by the way computers operate on information. Most of these concepts are just semantic wrappers around set operations or popular methodologies. Examples for this are the terms 'threading' and 'multiprocessing' surrounding algorithms for scheduling, messaging and the distribution of resources at fixed offsets, 'database' around a separate organized data retrieval system (eve
Only is not (Score:1)
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Ghost of Justice Scalia (Score:2)
Why Oracle should win its Java copyright case... (Score:1)
I thought the this article brought up some salient points.....
www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/google_oracle_comment/
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"Hey, the code structure is the same but we changed the variable names, see? fair use!"
All you've done there is demonstrate, clearly, that you don't understand what is going on.
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And portability will die. This isn't 1950 anymore, and heck, even in 1950 they understood the need for higher level languages.
As it is, Google is moving away from Dalvik, but what hopefully will come of this is that company's can't expect to attack people who use their function names and symbol tables as infringers. I'd prefer it if APIs weren't copyrightable, but I suppose protecting them under fair use is nearly as good.