Oracle copied Amazon’s API – was that copyright infringement?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/oracle-copied-amazons-api-was-that-copyright-infringement/

by callwaiting • 7 years ago

292 123 7 years ago

dlgeek• 7 years ago

I don't understand how Oracle's position here about how the Apache license covering code covers the API and their position in Oracle vs. Google.

saghm• 7 years ago

Their position seems pretty straightforward; other people should have to pay them money, but they shouldn't have to pay other people money. They have this same position on pretty much everything else too.

notlukesky• 7 years ago

I don’t understand why stating the facts is cause for being downvoted?? The hypocrisy is well known and documented.

EsssM7QVMehFPAs• 7 years ago

The Oracle vs. Google case is based around the copying of header files, including comments, verbatim as is.

The Oracle Amazon API usage is an identical re-implementation of the interfaces, but as a web solution there is per se nothing to copy in verbatim form.

The IBM-PC copycats back in the 80s went as far as clean room re-implementing the system with engineers who never saw the documentation. Ripping the header files out of a proprietary license package is quite cheap from a legal standpoint in comparison, even if open source is provided.

monocasa6• 7 years ago

I wonder who owns SQL. I hope IBM has been asking them this as well.

ananonymoususer• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase

monocasa6• 7 years ago

Sybase wasn't founded until five years after Oracle DB's first release.

grzm4• 7 years ago

"I wonder who owns SQL."

I don't know what it would mean for someone to "own SQL". It's an ISO standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#Interoperability_and_stand...

monocasa6• 7 years ago

So is Java, but here we are.

https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-wins-java-iso-approval/

gpm14• 7 years ago

What does being an "ISO standard" have to do with anything? The law does not make exceptions for things the ISO chose to standardize.

In fact, if Oracle is right, the ISO is likely violating the copyright of the original authors of SQL by even publishing that standard.

smiljo• 7 years ago

Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one.

Did Oracle infringe Amazon's copyright here? Ars Technica contacted Oracle to ask them if they had a license to copy Amazon's S3 API. An Oracle spokeswoman said that the S3 API was licensed under an Apache 2.0 license. She pointed us to the Amazon SDK for Java, which does indeed come with an Apache 2.0 license.
However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders.

While I'm not a lawyer and didn't study the Google case in that much detail, I don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation, and skip the SDK altogether. :)

nimbius• 7 years ago

how do Ceph and PureStorage handle their S3 implementations? the API doesnt seem variable enough that I cant use duplicity to send/receive with either of these...

paulddraper• 7 years ago

It is contradictory, but until the courts finally decide whether an API can be copyrighted, no one knows if they have to pay royalties or not, Oracle included.

rhacker• 7 years ago

It seems perfectly reasonable for Oracle to defend itself in court this way. It's kinda like an automatic win - if they get the Google lawsuit, then hey - bank... and then they will likely lose this case - but the stakes are pretty much tiny. Also AWS would have to go after a bunch of open source replicas of S3 too - which they probably DON'T want to do. And if they don't, Oracle may have a counter case in that it was unjustifiably targeted. However if they lose the Google case, then hey, they did nothing wrong here. Seems like a win win for Oracle.

dangus• 7 years ago

Oracle is the #1 law firm in Silicon Valley. Strangely, they seem to have a software side business.

rubinelli• 7 years ago

Copyright is not like trademark. Amazon can choose to enforce it selectively, and it should not influence any specific case.

EGreg• 7 years ago

Or the judges can also make contradictory judgments and screw Oracle in both cases for being an ass.

twblalock• 7 years ago

Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and the Google one.

As a legal strategy, that's not a problem, and in fact it's what lawyers are supposed to do: make the best possible arguments they can in any case they are a part of. It should not be interpreted as a case of corporate schizophrenia -- it's just the lawyers doing their jobs.

This can lead to contradictory positions if multiple cases are going on at the same time. That's fine. The legal system is designed around the assumption that this will happen.

fauigerzigerk3• 7 years ago

I think at Supreme Court level such a contradiction could be a (minor) problem, because the economic consequences of API copyrightability without fair use play a big role in that case. If Oracle's use of Amazon's API was based on an industry-wide fair use assumption that has supported the industry's economic viability over decades that could damage their argument.

However, I think that Oracle would argue that there is no contradiction.

In the case now before the US Supreme Court, Oracle argues that software copyrights do extend to the interface/API and that reimplementing the interface does not constitute fair use.

With regard to Amazon's API, Oracle argues that the license grants them permission to reimplement the interface.

This argument doesn't rely on disputing copyrightability of APIs or on fair use. It simply says that copyright holders get to decide whether or not reimplementation is permitted.

floodyberry-• 7 years ago

I believe you meant to say that yes, it is contradictory, and both Oracle and their lawyers don't care about what is right, just what they can get away with

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

But shouldn't Oracle be concerned about this from the perspective of overall business strategy?

Oracle's case with Google will likely set precedent. If the side they're arguing for is going to hurt another side of their business by removing their legal argument, why are they fighting?

treis3• 7 years ago

I don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation, and skip the SDK altogether. :)

They took an open source piece of software (the SDK) and made a derivative work (the backend the SDK uses). That indeed is copying and is essentially identical to what Google did. But there's no copyright violation here because Amazon explicitly granted everyone the right to do that by releasing the SDK under the Apache license.

TheGoddessInari• 7 years ago

OpenJDK is GPLv2 with linking exception.

I fail to see how it substantively differs.

gpm14• 7 years ago

Oracle did not comply with the SDKs license, nor did Google comply with openjdk's license.

Google acknowledge's this and isn't bothering to try and argue otherwise. They aren't presenting openjdk's license as a defense to infringement. Oracle for whatever reason is ignoring that issue in their statement to ars technica.

tzs• 7 years ago

Maybe they are trying to take advantage of some procedural quirks.

When Oracle sued Google, the case originally had both copyright claims and patent claims.

Is Amazon's API patented? If not, then if Amazon were to sue Oracle it would be only a copyright case, not a patent and copyright case.

Normally, appeals from most cases, including copyright cases, go to the appeals court for the same Circuit that the district court that heard the case is in, which would be the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (9th CA) in the case of Oracle vs. Google, and most likely also in an Amazon vs. Oracle.

However, if the case includes patent claims the appeal goes to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) instead of going to the CA for the circuit containing the district court.

If the case includes both patent claims and non-patent claims, the whole thing goes to CAFC which decides both the patent issues and the non-patent issues.

On patent issues, CAFC decisions are precedent for all district courts.

On those issues that get dragged along when a mixed case ends up at CAFC because it includes patent issues, CAFC is supposed to follow the precedent of the appeals court for the Circuit the case came from.

A lot of people believe that CAFC totally botched following 9th CA precedent in the Google case.

If Amazon sues Oracle but doesn't have a patent claim included to force appeals to CAFC, the appeal will end up at the 9th CA, which presumably will do a better job of following 9th CA precedent than CAFC did, and so rule against the API copyright (and so in favor of Oracle).

Until the Supreme Court actually gets around to settling this matter, we are in an inconsistent state in the 9th Circuit.

1. As far as specifically Google and Oracle are concerned, Oracle's API is copyrighted and what Google did infringes. CAFC said so when it handled the appeal, and that is binding precedent to the lower courts in any further proceeding between those two litigants.

2. For API copyright claims that are not between Oracle and Google and are not accompanied by a patent claim, the law is still what it was before the Google case.

3. For API copyright claims that are not between Oracle and Google but are accompanied by a patent claim, and so will be appealed through CAFC instead of 9th CA, presumably they will end up with the same wrong outcome as Oracle vs. Google.

spullara• 7 years ago

Java wasn't opensource. It had a specific license for mobile phones. The reason that Android didn't use their VM was the $1/device licensing fee for using Java on mobile devices. They reimplemented everything in order to avoid that $1.

thaumasiotes• 7 years ago

> However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders.

While that is indeed the difference between using the API and implementing the API, I was under the impression that the Google-Oracle dispute was about the API itself, not the implementation. In the restaurant analogy, that would be the menu ("hash browns"), not the cook ("the customer wants hash browns, what are you going to do about it?").

bitL• 7 years ago

Oracle used the Android lawsuit as a test how far the law can be pushed, that's why they insisted on pushing for more and prolonged the lawsuit, in order to clarify how far can be copyright law extended. Now they received the information and could incorporate it to their risk analysis wrt copying Amazon's API who is their primary competitor. View it as a "law algorithm".

syshum2• 7 years ago

Oracle, and many other tech companies, are experts at talking out of both sides of their mouth saying contrary things in different context's

This is common any more in legal battles. Where a company will take a position in one case that is completely contrary to its position in a different legal case

chunsj• 7 years ago

This is why we should use free software and not just open source one. And the importance of GPL3 for the humanity.

adharmad• 7 years ago

How would using a GPL3 license be helpful? Oracle is not embedding or even dynamically linking to Amazon S3 APIs. They have created their own implementation but copied the signatures to be compatible with Amazon S3 APIs. This is similar to Linus creating a free operating system while adhering to the POSIX standard.

matheusmoreira2• 7 years ago

The GPL was created partly in reaction to copyright protection being extended to source code. Copyleft licenses subvert copyright by forcing all involved to do the opposite of what they'd normally do with a copyrighted work.

The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally broken system.

ms4720• 7 years ago

Why? Should not content creators make a fair profit on their content? This includes books and movies. If you read Stallman's early writings on the matter his goal was to have software development funded and directed by the government, so no linux or bsds for example.

beefhash• 7 years ago

The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally broken system.

That would also bring about an abrupt end of license wars of permissive vs. copyleft, I suppose.

kalium-xyz• 7 years ago

Just to be clear, you can get away with this?

gpm14• 7 years ago

If they win the Google-Oracle case, they'll probably end up paying Amazon a bit in a new Amazon-Oracle case.

But yes, I'm pretty sure they can get away with this in the sense of avoiding submitting themselves to the their interpretation of the law unless/until it's ruled correct by a court.

The Google-Oracle case looks like it will be heard by the supreme court sometime in March, we'll get a ruling before the court goes out of session for the summer (the court takes a summer break).

I'm pretty sure even if Amazon sued Oracle now, that court would be happy to stay the case until the Supreme court rules. Even if the court wasn't actually willing to stay the case, it seems highly unlikely it would be at all resolved before the supreme court rules. Oracle is capable of delaying for a few months...

IANAL

o-__-o• 7 years ago

to be clear, there is nothing illegal with reverse engineering something. the burden is on the plantiff to prove infrigement (uphill battle). the problem is when the source code with an unfriendly license is made available then the question becomes is the new implementation infringing the work of the original. oracle v google is tough because google basically took java and executed 's/Java/GoogleJava/g'.

the amazon plea is different because amazon published their SDK AND gave it a permissive license. further oracle is not looking at the S3 code to figure out how to implement the API, they must implement the functionality of the API based off guesses of the client SDK.

gpm14• 7 years ago

The permissive license here does not matter, since Oracle did not comply with the extremely liberal terms of the license.

The implementation of Java and the implementation of the AWS API does not matter, since the Oracle-Google suit is (at this point) strictly over the structure sequence and organization of the APIs. How the code implementing the API came to be is completely and wholly irrelevant to the suit at hand.

Not that it matters (as explained above), but you're also wrong that google took java and executed 's/java/GoogleJava/g'. They re-implemented the entire API in dispute by hand, the only portion they copied from Oracle's implementation was the API.

michaelgiba• 7 years ago

Amazon did the same thing to MongoDB by replicating their API and as far as I know there hasn’t been any successful litigation on Mongos behalf

whoisthisfor• 7 years ago

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-int...

Others do this

ben5094• 7 years ago

Whether I like their position or not is irrelevant, whether I like Oracle is irrelevant, even whether it's what the law says is irrelevant: Oracle's position and their actions are entirely consistent.

They're copying the S3 API, and they did so under the license granted in the S3 client software.

If you publish either your client or server software, or some specification of your API and you do so with some kind of license, you are licensing your API.

Amazon's publishing of their client software under Apache means they have licensed their API to everyone who downloaded it, including Oracle. The license is irrevocable.

Google copied Java's API without getting license to do so. Java was not published by Oracle or Sun with such a license, nor did Google obtain such license to use their API by contacting Oracle for one.

The I in API means interface. Ars is getting confused by the API and the implementation of it here:

However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders. Code that uses an API will be organized completely differently from code that implements one; it may not even contain the whole API. And Oracle has for years argued that using an API is unrelated to reimplementation and not an infringement of copyright (or else every app developer using Java would infringe).

The client library isn't the code using the API, it contains the the API. Oracle argues in the link:

This case is about Google’scopying of Oracle’s work. App programmers are unaffected. They remain free to write any program they want availing themselves of the Java APIs, for free. The decision only requires platform developers — usually large corporations with tremendous resources, like Google—to take a license if they want to copy Oracle’s work and incorporate it into a substitute commercial product.

Oracle's point here is that an application using a small portion of the API is acceptable copying. AWS published and licensed the entire client software, containing the entire API for S3.

gpm14• 7 years ago

They're copying the S3 API, and they did so under the license granted in the S3 client software.

This is plainly false. To do so under the license they would have had to comply with the terms of the license, which include attribution. They did not do so.

ben5094• 7 years ago

You're referring to clause 4 in the license[1] which states:

    4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the
       Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without
       modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You
       meet the following conditions:

Oracle's server software is not redistributing the API.

[1] https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java-v2/blob/master/LICENSE.t...

jayd165• 7 years ago

It seems they're copying the back-end API which would not be covered by the client SDK license.

gpm14• 7 years ago

I didn't check, but it is possible that the client contains a complete copy of the back-end API. That would be pretty common with auto generated clients.

loeg3• 7 years ago

Google copied Java's API without getting license to do so. Java was not published by Oracle or Sun with such a license, nor did Google obtain such license to use their API by contacting Oracle for one.

Patently false. Java was published by Sun with an open source license over a decade ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK

ben5094• 7 years ago

That lawsuit has been dragging on for even longer, it wasn't open source licensed at the time. (Technically it was, but it was one of those corporate "community" licenses that has loads of strings attached.)

ggm5• 7 years ago

I didn't see the line in this which said Oracle's API claims vested in Java bindings which were covered by the apache licence. So, in the whole 'hypocritical' thing, it behoves us to be clear, that product A, not in Apache licence, and product B, in Apache licence, do not actually inform anything in a legal claim of API copyright in product A, vs product B

I don't personally think an API should be subject to copyright, I think copyright and patents in things like this is counter productive. But the law here isn't in alignment with my personal views, and Oracle's defence does not vest in some supposed consistency across things they use and things they own: if they can prove they own a thing which is bound by IPR/Copyright rules, then thats the law.

'Do not steal my property' is not rebutted by 'but you stole somebody else's unrelated property in another situation' -If that was the case, an awful lot of law has to be re-written, its pretty much tit-for-tat law at that point.

Another take would be "even criminals have civil rights"

jayd165• 7 years ago

This misrepresents the situation as the client SDK is not what is being copied. In fact, you can use the same Amazon client SDK to hit the Oracle backend api, which Oracle did copy from S3's backend.

ggm5• 7 years ago

Sorry, but aren't you making my point for me? people are diving into 'hypocrite' arguments, comparing apples and lobster.

In what way do I mis-represent the situation? Oracle is suing Google for copying an API. People are saying "but Oracle copied the Amazon API" -I'm trying to say "yea.. nah: not relevant"

ben5094• 7 years ago

The client SDK describes the entire interface, though.

Low level protocols like HTTP are arguably different for different roles, which is where I think this confusion comes from. For example, a socket server has to listen, while a socket client has to connect, and those are different processes.

But an application's interface is describing a set of, broadly speaking, function call signatures.

Specifically, it's describing the names of the function calls, the parameter types and return types. (And it describes those types as well.)

Those must be identical for the API to work. There's no difference between the "client API" and "server API" by the definition of API, clients and servers are different in role and implementation.

tingletech2• 7 years ago

Did they copy the API, or, are they using open source software to implement the API?

warmfuzzykitten• 7 years ago

What a stupid premise. The Apache version 2 license permits, well, pretty much any use of the software, source or binary. The Sun/Oracle copyrights do not.

franga2000• 7 years ago

The Apache license applies to the Java SDK (== the Java library Amazon made to help developers use their (HTTP)API). It does not apply to the Amazon (HTTP) API specification (or implementation) itself. Oracle could, for example, implement their own "Oracle storage bucket Java SDK" with a matching (Java) API that developers could drop in instead of Amazon's in their Java projects and wouldn't have to change any code, but that is in no way transferable to the (HTTP) API (i.e. the one that runs on Amazon's servers).

gregorygoc• 7 years ago

Can I patent open/read/write/close methods? I might have an idea for the greatest troll in modern era.

jess-sch• 7 years ago

At least for close(), I'm very much in favor. Maybe that would push more languages to implement automatic destructors.

(More realistically though, it'd unfortunately mostly result in mass renaming to .destroy())

Spivak• 7 years ago

No, because a patent would only cover your novel implementation of those functions.

You can't copyright them either in the same way that Harry Potter is copyrighted but not the word 'the' which is used throughout.

Pandabob2• 7 years ago

This is wildly off-topic, but I don't understand how Oracle still makes money. Who are their customers? What are they selling to them and what's their comparative advantage? Do they make money off of MySQL? Java? Are they selling services? I don't get how they're still in business.

syshum2• 7 years ago

I know many companies that just sent them 5-6 Figure checks to license JRE....

They also have Lots of Med to Large organizations using a number of their products, a lot of them are Oracle customers simply because they were using products that oracle acquired and since they are now entrenched into the business process it is easier to keep paying Oracle than extract those products with alternatives

Pandabob2• 7 years ago

Interesting. I wonder how threatened Oracle's business is by the big cloud providers, Amazon and Microsoft specifically? I guess not enough to reflect it on the stock price.

PedroBatista• 7 years ago

Pretty much every medium to big government entity and private corporation or bank runs some sort of Oracle DB or software with foggy ROI. Their customers are on the business of not losing what they already have, so a couple million here and there is not a big deal.

Oracle copied Amazon’s API – was that copyright infringement?

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