Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/07/921018204/google-and-oracles-decade-long-copyright-battle-reaches-supreme-court

by dataflow • 6 years ago

314 412 6 years ago

blackbear_• 6 years ago

Waiting for Oracle to patent social networks and sue Facebook...

tonetheman• 6 years ago

I am always downvoted when I comment on Oracle stories but if Tiktok has any IP around social or uploading videos... you that is exactly their intention.

protomyth2• 6 years ago

Anyone who has had dealings with Oracle licensing knows how bad this is going to get.

donmcronald2• 6 years ago

Those in Oracle's camp say if its copyright is not protected, that will discourage innovation.

Look at the way YouTube Content ID encourages innovation and then imagine GitHub Content ID.

“Your repository contains 3 copyrighted method calls. You’ve been issued a copyright strike.”

I’d love to see every open source repo on the internet go private for 1 day as a demonstration of what could be lost if copyright is allowed to weasel its way into APIs.

GitHub and NPM should give users the option to block their repos for a day. A bazillion failing builds would open some eyes IMO.

segfaultbuserr2• 6 years ago

In this timeline, the Wine repo mirror will be instantaneously banned on GitHub.

swiley• 6 years ago

Wine's userspace being legal is probably what keeps the gamers from just running the available userspace source code from Microsoft. I doubt getting it banned would be something Microsoft actually wants.

user59944612• 6 years ago

Then imagine the outrage from European companies and users getting hit by this ludicrous US copyright thing that doesn't apply to them (the European court rejected oracle claims long ago).

gonzo41• 6 years ago

Could be a good moment for the European software industry.

msla• 6 years ago

It applies to them the same way the GDPR applies to American companies: If they have sufficient money in the US which can be hit by a judgement, it applies.

kinkrtyavimoodh• 6 years ago

European users get hit by plenty of ludicrous things of their own making anyway.

nvarsj2• 6 years ago

This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product?

Github projects already should strive to use correct licensing, and comply with the license of code they use. There is nothing new here.

protomyth2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure it is. Given that an original API might have a single method with the same signature as one used in a copyrighted API or the malicious actors we have in this industry, I can see the problems with YouTube Content ID coming to GitHub.

coldpie7• 6 years ago

You don't understand what this case is about. This is about copyrighting API descriptions. Not copying code, but reimplementing an API that someone else created. Think about how many people created each part of the various web APIs. Is XmlHTTPRequest now owned by Microsoft? Who invented the Blink tag? Who owns which parts of the SQL language? The entire software industry is built on the idea that APIs are not copyrightable. If you thought software patent trolling was bad, buddy, you ain't see nothin' yet.

vetinari• 6 years ago

Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product?

You surely meant 9, not 10k, lines of code for rangeCheck(), didn't you?

Aengeuad• 6 years ago

11k Lines of code seems like a lot especially if you're insisting that it was just wholly ripped out of an existing codebase but that isn't the case here at all and even Oracle make that clear in their analogy:

It says what Google has done is like taking key parts of those books — chapter titles, character names, the first sentence of each paragraph — writing a new book, and selling it.

If you're reimplementing APIs as Google has done then at some point you _need_ to copy the structure of the existing API, the method signatures, the names of the methods, the descriptions of what they do, etc, and while you may be able to dig out a thesaurus to claim enough original creative work at some point it's all for moot because there's only so much you can do before you'll start infringing upon Oracles creative expression of their API which severely limits what you are able to do with it.

If Oracle wins this case it will have huge implications for any reverse engineered work like Wine or graphics drivers where such projects will cease to exist, because it won't actually matter if it's 100% your own implementation as any interface to existing APIs or hardware _will_ infringe upon other companies copyright.

As far as Youtube Content ID goes it doesn't actually matter if it's 3 seconds or 3 minutes of copyrighted work, if it's matched then Youtube will let those companies claim revenue from your video which may be an hour long. The alternative here is the legal system and courts which may absolutely agree that 3 seconds of use in an hour long video is fair use, but you're still going to end up in court to defend that usage. It's unlikely that Oracle has enough sway to force Github to implement a similar content matching system but if they did it doesn't really matter what threshold the courts set for fair use for reimplementing APIs just like it doesn't matter for Youtube, best make sure all your repos don't use something like XMLHttpRequest() or your repo may disappear, and of course if Oracle doesn't have the sway to force Github into implementing such a system you're still going to have to go check through all your your repos because if they feel you've infringed upon their creative work they'll be able to issue takedown requests and your only recourse will be through the courts.

ForHackernews• 6 years ago

A bazillion failing builds would open some eyes IMO.

No it wouldn't. Lawyers and executives don't care about your error-prone CI/CD pipeline.

Shared404• 6 years ago

But their rich clients do.

compsciphd5• 6 years ago

anyone who believes that GPLd dynamically linked libraries impact code written to use them effectively believes that APIs can be copyrighted. (ex: the FSF believes this).

coldpie7• 6 years ago

You may be right, but can you supply a citation for this? I believe many open-core software vendors work around this idea by doing exactly what you suggest: creating an API barrier where the proprietary software lives on one side and the GPL'd software on the other. It requires some care so you don't cross GPL'd software into the proprietary side, but it's fairly common. I think the Linux Nvidia GPU driver works this way.

marcosdumay3• 6 years ago

It is different. In the GPL case, you are distributing the software, not just using the API.

I don't know if it's different enough, but it's not the exact same issue.

belorn6• 6 years ago

Those two are complete different concepts within copyright.

Oracle claim is that google copies of header files requires copy right permission, with google saying that header files are either not protected by copyright or that using them is fair use.

FSF claim in regard to dynamically linked libraries is that using them in a work creates a derivative work. For C code, software without its dynamically linked libraries won't even load past the linker, and in their view, a judge/jury will see the program as a single work rather than two independent works.

This court case will not define what is a derivative work or when two combined works should be seen as independent of each other. It may explore the limits of what is copyrightable and what is fair use, which is interesting in terms of API's and compatibility but less so for defining the limits of the GPL as an copyright license.

tomcat27• 6 years ago

seriously! strike for a week.

Kednicma2• 6 years ago

Google argues that no one should be allowed to claim ownership of this kind of code.

Imagine if we took Google's argument seriously and extended it. What if code were inherently less copyrightable when it is more structural and boilerplate-filled? That could be a great thing, but Google themselves might be surprised at how little of their proprietary code qualifies for copyright under this standard.

For example, would Google's protobuf schemata still be copyrightable? They're needed for interoperability, after all. Would Google's client-side code for Youtube and Google Docs still be copyrightable? It's delivered in textual form to the end-user. Would Android's interface code be copyrightable? Probably not, by exactly the same argument that Google has been making before the courts!

If Google wins, then not only does Oracle lose, but the institution of copyright might also lose, which is an exciting proposition.

donmcronald2• 6 years ago

Id rather have nothing copyrighted than everything copyrighted. I also don’t have a huge problem with interfaces = no copyright and implementations = copyright.

flohofwoe• 6 years ago

Getting rid of copyright restrictions for everything software-related (as a first step at least) would be a win-win for everybody involved.

Zigurd4• 6 years ago

That is an absurd position. APIs are facts, like sports scores, or the amounts and ingredients in a recipe. Those are not protectable, and making them protectable is plainly ridiculous.

Kednicma2• 6 years ago

Careful there. Source code to a program is also a fact; it's merely the proof of some statement in some theory. This is one way to view the Curry-Howard-Lambek isomorphism. So, then, what is it about source code which would make it copyrightable again? Are systems like Metamath and Opentheory eligible for copyright or not?

To me, the current copyright regime is what's "absurd" and "plainly ridiculous"; I am merely drawing conclusions based on what exists.

molticrystal• 6 years ago

Scotus Blog did a great job describing the case for those who need to know a case preview before it goes up to the Supreme Court:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/10/case-preview-justices-to-...

tasubotadas• 6 years ago

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.

This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.

pojntfx2• 6 years ago

True. IMHO IP law is based on a moral and not a utilitarian basis, and as we know from almost all recent FLOSS projects especially in Cloud (Linux, Kubernetes, ...) IP is just a massive hindrance to productivity and has a net negative effect on the industry.

srtjstjsj2• 6 years ago

The US Constitution explicitly cites utilitarian goals in the Copyright Clause.

kelnage• 6 years ago

It’s not at all clear how you are comparing Linux to its closed competitors, but frankly, if that’s the best example you can pick, I’d suggest copyright is largely winning that battle. Yes, Linux has probably “won” in some markets (servers/IoT being the obvious ones), but there are plenty of markets where that is not even close to being true.

necheffa• 6 years ago

plenty

Actually, just one, the desktop.

In virtually every other market, Linux is either dominating or has a firm share.

kgwxd• 6 years ago

Almost all serious competition to Linux exist only because of copyright.

memset• 6 years ago

I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute. I think about art, and artists as a musician myself.

One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation. The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement. The musician trying to sell their first album.

You could argue that litigation is too costly for an individual, which may be true, but this is one reason artists choose to sell their images via Getty. They gain access to a marketplace, and Getty handles licensing and enforcement, which makes it easier for artists to be fairly compensated for their work.

This isn’t absolute either: there is enforcement too aggressive (ask any Youtube creator), or limits too long (Disney).

But I cannot help but think that, with no copyright whatsoever, then the little guys will have a harder time protecting themselves from folks who would otherwise like to use that art without compensating the creator.

hyper_reality• 6 years ago

The truth is somewhere between your statement and parent's, in my opinion.

Copyright is necessary but the laws today are draconian and far too extensive. For works since 1978, copyright lasts for the entire length of the author's life, plus an additional 70 years. The "Mickey Mouse" protection act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act) increased this even further for some works.

There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money from their creations and not just get their work instantly reproduced by pirates. At the same time, it's in the public interest for their work to become widely available after a short period of protection. I don't know exactly how long that period should be to maximally benefit society, but 15 years sounds a lot more reasonable than life+75 years.

It's absolutely absurd that Arthur Conan Doyle's distant ancestors can today be suing people for creating derivatives of Sherlock Holmes, a literary character conceived in 1887. Sherlock Holmes belongs to the public, not some greedy relatives trying to leech a living from him.

ghaff6• 6 years ago

In a no copyright world, I assume you would have aggregators who vacuum up photos, books, etc. and index/package/curate them in a way that they're more easily discoverable and consumable by the people willing to pay for that service. Without paying anything to the original creators.

You've seen this on a small scale in areas like clipart. It's not a very lucrative business though and it does mean you only have creators with either "passion" or money.

psychoslave2• 6 years ago

I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute.

I don’t know, you see, sometimes I have some doubts about my uncertainty. But should I trust my memory about what might have happened in my head in the past?

I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation.

Practices of art and culture, including music, long predate any copyright law. Or even money, most likely (an archeologist will tell you that with more confidence about the veracity of such a claim).

According monopoly of exploitation rarely turn into proliferation of diversity, most of the time it will fall into feedback loop where a few entities will "take it all" and widely spread the "best fit for all".

The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement.

There are different topic here. In the French droit d’auteur, you have a separation of "moral rights" – including who is granted to publish your work in which context – and "patrimonial rights" – how monetization of the work is managed.

logicOnly2• 6 years ago

As a little guy, I can't afford a lawyer, copyright only hurts me.

cturner3• 6 years ago

There is a documented situation where Getty attempted to charge an artist for their own work (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340178).

The only reason we know of that particular case is because they happened to charge the original creator.

The dynamic is ripe for corruption. If Getty failed to report all the works they were collecting for, and instead siphoned money off on the side, how would anyone know?

bottled_poe• 6 years ago

Those that absorb effort, resources and risk in creating something new/innovative should at least have the opportunity be compensated for their investment. The balance needs to be fair, and that’s what is being argued. It’s simply not as black and white as how you have described this issue.

ubercow13• 6 years ago

Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.

diffeomorphism• 6 years ago

I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms:

0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.

3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms. The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".

vaccinator2• 6 years ago

You cant be serious...

incompatible• 6 years ago

Who can say for sure what would have happened if Linus had used an MIT-style license instead. Linux would not necessarily have failed. But if, for example, a proprietary version had become dominant, that would have been enabled by copyright law. It's not the existence of copyright law that allows Linux to succeed as an open-source project.

bluecalm• 6 years ago

Huge upfront investment like writing a book or composing music. It's a common moral intuition that it's not ok to take what others spent time developing and profit from it instead of them without adding much yourself.

It's the scope and duration of the protection that is a problem but I think it's too simplistic to say we don't need it at all.

traveler01• 6 years ago

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.

Well, I don't agree with that. Music, games, movies, need those kind of protections otherwise look at what happens in China...

This case though, it's only Oracle being Oracle. A stupid greedy corporation trying to profit on other's successes.

logicOnly2• 6 years ago

IP was never about society. It was a tool for the rich to create a monopoly on a product.

IP disproportionately helps organizations rather than individuals. And the major owners of those organizations are the 0.01% class

Polylactic_acid• 6 years ago

IMO IP protection should be short lived. Imagine if copyright ownership lasted 10 years. The profits made on producing a video game would be almost identical since almost all profit is made in the first few years and half of the lifetime profit is in the first week.

What it would mean is the games that we all played as kids but are long since out of store shelves would now be free to distribute.

crazypython• 6 years ago

Richard Stallman would like 30 year copyrights, and to unbundle copyright.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

I wonder when the first GPLd software will be public copyright and I can modify it and sell it at my wits? 60 years?

E8DVHXqR• 6 years ago

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.

I agree with that. IP also doesn't make any sense to me from a philosophical perspective. I don't understand why making one thing once should give me a monopoly on making things that are similar to that thing.

The fact that the question of how similar a thing must be to fall under my monopoly is so arbitrary and ill-defined also leads to an enormous amount of resources being wasted on litigation and designing around the law.

Non-disclosure agreements are sufficient to allow an inventor to be first to market. They should not be able to use the government to enforce a monopoly after that.

tenuousemphasis• 6 years ago

Stephen Kinsella makes a great case for doing away with all intellectual property laws in Against Intellectual Property.

https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0

regulation_d2• 6 years ago

It seems to me very intuitive that a lack of IP protection of some sort discourages innovation.

I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely.

The policy concerns around IP protection for both patent and copyright are clear: the minimum amount of protection that doesn't discourage innovation.

Lawmakers know or should know that we all benefit from a rich public domain, which is why there are limitations on both copyright and patents in terms of both duration and general application, and I am happy to argue that copyright is too strong, particularly in terms of duration (thanks Disney), but I simply can't agree that we "would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP".

npsimons2• 6 years ago

I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely.

Your lack of imagination is disappointing, and also hints at a failure of empathy.

npsimons2• 6 years ago

I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.

This is pretty much the FSF's argument in a nutshell. It's pretty obvious what the end game for "intellectual property" is once you read RMS's "Right to Read."

koolba• 6 years ago

Due to the pandemic, we’ll actually be able to hear the arguments and SCOTUS questions live as well. Possibly an acquired taste, but I found the last round of phone hearings very interesting and entertaining.

warmwaffles• 6 years ago

I actually find it fun to listen to. Generally because the argument process and retorts are always well calculated. Wishing I could be that good.

tapoxi• 6 years ago

If this (somehow) succeeds, could IBM sue Oracle over SQL compatibility?

josefx2• 6 years ago

There are specific exceptions for compatibility. Android Java never tried to be compatible, various required APIs were replaced or are just flat out missing from the runtime library.

ysleepy• 6 years ago

Of course it's about compatibility, about code-reuse of existing libraries. – Which is done a lot to this day.

curt152• 6 years ago

Where are such compatibility exceptions articulated? Section 107 lists four factors for fair use, including

"the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."

Trying to achieve full compatibility would seem to require copying more of the original API, not less.

gpm8• 6 years ago

I don't believe there is any existing specific exception that allows for completely compatible API s (which you appear to be claiming sql is) but not partially compatible ones (Java). Can you cite a source for this claim?

bluGill• 6 years ago

IBM contributed SQL to international standards (Or is it just ANSI? I don't care too look that up), so probably not. It isn't clear though, joining ISO generally requires you to license your patents for a "reasonable price" (Reasonably for a big company, tens to thousands of dollars....), but of course IBM didn't agree to that back then, so would courts say IBM implicitly agreed to the standards of the day where it was thought not required or not... Could go either way but I'd guess IBM would lose such a battle.

wtallis4• 6 years ago

Any ISO requirements about reasonable patent licensing would be irrelevant here, because this case is about copyrights (albeit a very patent-like category of copyrights that Oracle is trying to establish).

tmccrary555• 6 years ago

Although I don't think it was a standard when Oracle reimplemented it originally.

Kind of like how Java is now open source and Google can use it but Oracle's lawsuit is about what Google did before it was open source.

But I'd guess there's some kind of statute of limitations or similar for infringement that old.

kevin_b_er3• 6 years ago

License your patents maybe, but what about your newfound copyright on the SQL language?

totaldude87• 6 years ago

I think we would be better off, if we follow the pharmacy world. Like they have full controls over a new vaccine for x years and then it becomes generic! Problem is that technology space moves so fast that if x year term is say 5-10 years , that would nullify entire process!

srtjstjsj2• 6 years ago

That's exactly how Copyright works, which is to be expected because Copyrights and Patents are governed by the same overarching law.

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

Except that copyright is 95 years. That's insanely long for software.

webmaven4• 6 years ago

I think we would be better off, if we follow the pharmacy world. Like they have full controls over a new vaccine for x years and then it becomes generic! Problem is that technology space moves so fast that if x year term is say 5-10 years , that would nullify entire process!

That is, in fact, how copyright works, and the original term was 14 years. Since then, the term has been extended several times in the name of "harmonization", and the term is currently so long it might as well be infinite, as far as software is concerned.

jasode3• 6 years ago

This is a complete dramatization. Are you copying 10k lines of code from a licensed code base into your project without permission and using it in your commercial product?

To point back to the substance of the thread and Oracle's claims...

Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.

Instead, Google copied the API of function name spellings and also the hierarchy of organization (tree of namespaces) of those API methods. I asked about this in a previous comment and some folks more familiar with the case replied with citations of court opinions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7852100

So to give a flippant summary of the current situation: you _can_ copy some exact spellings of API function names (e.g. other browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari can copy Microsoft IE XMLHttpRequest() exactly without renaming it to RetrieveHttpXtensibleMarkupLang()) -- as long as you don't copy too much of the API surface area. The threshold of "too much" and getting in legal trouble is yet to be determined by The US Supreme Court.

If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.

st1x72• 6 years ago

I wonder how a meaningful discussion about namespace trees and API spelling takes place at the Supreme Court considering the background of the justices.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 6 years ago

They're smart people and these are not hard concepts.

simiones4• 6 years ago

Do you wonder the same for an abortion hearing or a sanitation case? The court system can and must decide regulations on many things they are not personally experts in, and usually does so quite successfully.

GoblinSlayer5• 6 years ago

The book analogy in the linked article is a good example of an interface and should be understandable without background.

mantap3• 6 years ago

If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.

This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything.

jasode3• 6 years ago

If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement.

From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming :

[...] Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked." Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 976. [...]

[1] don't know where the canonical source is so I provide a Google search link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s...

webmaven4• 6 years ago

This isn't how copyright works though. It's neither necessary or sufficient. If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement. If by happenstance you come up with the same wording in your API, then that would not be copyright infringement because you didn't copy anything.

That also isn't how copyright works.

You're essentially asserting copyright over the semantics of an API.

The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright.

That said, even if the un-synonymized API is protected by copyright (and I would generally argue otherwise), reimplementing it must be seen as fair use, all the more so an API with renamed functions.

For a more recent example: Amazon's DocumentDB reimplements the MongoDB API. This should be allowed, even though we could wish Amazon had acted otherwise.

Here is the crux of the matter: unless there is some sort of no-man's-land between the various intellectual property regimes for software, no interoperability will be allowed except that which a vendor explicitly opts into. If copyrights, trademarks, and patents overlap sufficiently, even clean-room reimplementations will be forbidden.

We can argue about which aspects of software should be protected, for how long, and by what means, but at the end of the day there must be an unprotectable area of some kind, or we're all going to be doomed to either working entirely within vendors' vertically integrated stacks, or else implementing NSidedWheelAPIFactoryFactory() all the way down to bare metal for the foreseeable future.

threatofrain• 6 years ago

There will likely be no such thing as "drop-in" replacement anymore either.

yetihehe2• 6 years ago

Or it will create api compatibility layers (shims).

arethuza• 6 years ago

I used to know a very bright chap who refused to use meaningful identifiers - his argument was mainly that you could never capture enough information in an identifier to be really accurate so you shouldn't even try.

Nice chap, but fortunately he was a school friend and not a colleague!

Maybe we should just use GUIDs for everything :-)

bitwize6• 6 years ago

Hello, I'd like to talk to you about Urbit. Have you accepted Curtis Yarvin as your personal savior of your digital life?

kiliancs• 6 years ago

You should check out Unison https://www.unisonweb.org/

snarf21• 6 years ago

In addition to the specific claims and their validity, one fact remains. Oracle bought Sun for the sole purpose of suing Google. Full stop. I used to date someone involved in the case when it was just getting started. Oracle can go pound sand.

fierarul• 6 years ago

Thing is Google were also nasty towards Sun and helped it go under quite well. In many ways this is karma but too bad there's so much externality to it.

strbean• 6 years ago

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Sun licensed Java under an open license that would have allowed Google to use these interfaces without issue, if they had met certain criteria for supporting the full Java platform. Google essential thought "Well, we have too much bloat, and these parts are totally unneeded in our platform, so we're going to strip them out."

Oracle's lawsuit is so bad-faith it is laughable.

_alex_• 6 years ago

there was no other reason to buy sun?

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 6 years ago

If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions. We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.

It's worse than that isn't it? Naming is how you link things. What happens to WINE if it is illegal to use the same names Kernel32 does?

Wowfunhappy7• 6 years ago

From everything I've read, Wine would quite clearly be illegal if the court rules in favor of Oracle.

I am very worried about this case.

tachyonbeam2• 6 years ago

It's bad for programmers everywhere. If Oracle wins, you couldn't reimplement a compatible version of anything that's not open source. You couldn't make a third-party implementation of a corporate-owned programming language without putting yourself at risk.

Imagine you're a company using some Oracle database, and you want to reimplement some component of that system in order to migrate and escape their vendor lock-in... You can't, not without taking a huge legal risk.

In the short term, it's a victory for huge litigious corporations like Oracle. The good thing, I hope, is that in the long term, this will make people distrust closed source software even more. What Oracle wants, and has always wanted, is to bind you in the worst possible form of vendor lock-in. Open source and open standards are the answer. Refuse anything else.

espadrine• 6 years ago

What happens to WINE if it is illegal to use the same names Kernel32 does?

I was wondering where would the Oracle win hurt most, and I think there is worse than WINE.

The Unix syscalls would have been Bell Labs’ copyright. That copyright was sold to Novell, which was sold to… Micro Focus International plc?

So this British consulting company that is, according to its website, “powering digital transformation”, could transform the digital world by suing BSD, Linux, Apple and Microsoft for tremendous sums of money and forbid them from using the famous syscalls.

I guess a given set of CLI programs may also be seen as an application programming interface, which makes all of GNU liable too.

Is that correct?

elmo2you• 6 years ago

It might also be worth mentioning that this case is first and foremost a big money power play (arguably even with abuse of the legal system), between two immensely powerful businesses (each of which probably deserve to be called a criminal enterprises, but hey .. this is America), and very little about the merit of their respective arguments.

In other words: both primary care about winning the case. No matter how they get it done, or whatever the fallout/consequences will be for anyone but themselves. Arguably that is fine for any company, since their sole responsibility is to look after itself. But the legal ramifications of their (legal) actions can extend far beyond that, for which I certainly consider them and the US legal system responsible, collectively.

I sincerely wonder sometimes, that besides the potential damage many do recognize as a fallout of this court case, how many people realize that mud fight between two way-too-powerful sandbox bullies may end up being responsible for making the USA a pariah within the landscape of future software development?

Or does everyone believe that if this goes sideways, that the rest of the world will just respect this "funny logic" and all go with it?

In fact, how many Americans even realize that the increasing radicalization and absurdity of their intellectual property rules will inevitably harm the USA big time in the long run? Or does everyone still think that the USA will remain the center of everything and the only one dictating the rules?

Things like these do not happen in a vacuum. The rest of the world is watching.

op032• 6 years ago

Not if you marry a good lawyer. Just a tip.

tachyonbeam2• 6 years ago

Just hope you never have to divorce them.

Spivak6• 6 years ago

We'll have to waste brain cycles coming up and alternative spellings of methods to stay away from copyright infringement.

You do realize that if literally all you do is change the names and spellings then you'll still be in violation of copyright, right? Translating a book into another language (where the names and spellings of every word are different) is still copyright infringement. The fact that the names and spellings are the same just provides evidence to the judge that copying occurred.

If you just rename all the methods and their argument variables you still open yourselves up to a lawsuit because all the plaintiff is going to do is show the judge a mapping between their and your names and it will be plain as day as to what happened.

dagw• 6 years ago

You do realize that if literally all you do is change the names and spellings then you'll still be in violation of copyright, right?

In general that is largely true. In the particular type of copyright being argued in this particular case Oracle has stated that changing the name or spelling of the methods would have been enough to avoid being in violation:

Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked."

dragonwriter18• 6 years ago

Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.

That's not true, there were nine lines of source code (range check) copied verbatim, not counting the 11,500 lines of API declarations.

But the API declarations are source code, too.

If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions.

That really depends on how Oracle wins, and specifically what rule is articulated.

d3ntb3ev1l• 6 years ago

Folks realize some of the people at Google were actually previously on the Java team.

emilecantin• 6 years ago

IIRC Judge Alsup (the original judge, and the only person in this whole shit-show who knows anything about programming) ruled against this, as he determined that there were only so many ways to write a range-checking function. He said it was entirely plausible that the Google developer would have come up with the exact same function independently.

onion2k• 6 years ago

Or the companies that the developers work for pay the original creator of the API, which is the solution Oracle are angling for.

amanaplanacanal• 6 years ago

If the original creator is willing to license them at all.

GoblinSlayer5• 6 years ago

Oracle proposes a change for the sake of uniqueness, but uniqueness is not copyrightable. And if non-copyrightable change is all you can reasonably do, then there's little if any room for creativity. Also it's obvious `max` is not a creative, but a traditional name for such function, not to mention one can't copyright a common word in wide use.

There's no technical way to not copy the interface, especially method names, and imagine what happens when you implement an interface: it's copied verbatim.

brundolf• 6 years ago

The problem isn't that programmers will have to get more creative with naming, it's that it will be fundamentally impossible for pieces of software owned by different entities to communicate over shared names without an explicit license agreement. That's a much, much bigger deal.

stjohnswarts2• 6 years ago

It's not just the names, it's the structure as well. Oracle is implying that the structure (heirarchy) is also a signifier of the API. You can't actually get around that if you're trying to mirror an API but do a white room implementation of the underlying code. It would still be considered illegal if the SCOTUS decides for Oracle. You would still have to license or hope you didn't get found out.

novaleaf• 6 years ago

If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions.

I think you are a bit off the mark on this line. (mostly agree with the rest of your post)

Google's goal was to make a white-room implementation of java that was 100% api compatible. This was explicitly to avoid licensing Java while still being Java compatible.

zaphar• 6 years ago

I don't think this is true. Google doesn't let you run java that was compiled for the JVM. They have an entirely different mechanism that is not the jvm for their java code to compile to.

All they did was port the language to a new compile target. When you port a language over you also port the standard library or at least the parts that you need. This is standard across the industry. Every language implementation does it. What Oracle is trying to say is that you need a license to do it and that is a dramatic change in the industry practice right now.

It's also short sighted. If Oracle wins then you'll need a license to implement java the language (as opposed to the JVM) anywhere. Short term Oracle get's a pile of money. Long term everyone stops using Java. But then again if you are Oracle, with it's current values, Java's only real value is short term money gains. It's hard to make money on a programming language the way Oracle prefers to operate so this may be the best they can do.

slaymaker1907• 6 years ago

I think if Oracle wins, what really needs to happen is we need to begin lobbying congress to explicitly exclude APIs from copyright protection. I think that this could definitely work, particularly since so much software relies on APIs not being copyrighted.

colejohnson662• 6 years ago

Or we could have companies Oracle copied sue them. For example: IBM for SQL.

getpolarized• 6 years ago

Here's a good analogy for non-programers.

You're building a new car company.

You see all the existing cars, the roads, and the garages.

So you measure the width of the car and the garage and you decide that the car should be exactly 6' wide.

Then you ship your car. Enjoy 15 years of market success.

Then you find that Oracle created the first cars and says they have copyright on the width of your car.

That's how stupid this is...

mehrdadn7• 6 years ago

I don't think that's a good analogy at all. A car's precise width is not part of its interface nor a part of its design anyone particularly cares about. Its interface is more like, the design of the UX... how the steering wheel, dashboard, etc. look and feel. If a company copied those but changed everything underneath so that people could buy a cheaper alternative without seeing a difference on their usage... I don't know, is that actually legal?

hashtagmarkup• 6 years ago

What if Google copied the name of Oracle's car and stamped it on the back? What if Google also copied the name of the in-car entertainment system and put all the buttons in the same place and stamped the same name on the dash? What if the shape of the car was exactly the same, and was only available in the exact same colors as Oracle's car? What if Google opened a car dealership next door to every single Oracle dealership with giant signs that said their cars are effectively interchangeable?

That's how stupid car analogies are...

boplicity• 6 years ago

Let's compare this to a completely different field: cookbooks.

Recipes themselves aren't copyright protected. However, specific instructions for the recipes are protected.

In addition, though individual recipes aren't protected, a collection of recipes is protected.

There is a line, though, between copying a few recipes, and an entire collection. That line is not easy to define, but that doesn't preclude the existence of such a line.

So – is an API considered a single recipe? Or is it a "recipe collection?" That seems to me to be an important distinction.

If you were to copy one set of API function names that cover a limited area, then it could be argued that you used just one "recipe" and that it would be OK. However, if an entire collection of API function names across a very broad range of categories was copied, then it is harder to argue that you didn't copy any entire collection, and not just an individual recipe.

vernie• 6 years ago

It's always the case that if Oracle wins we lose.

nodamage• 6 years ago

The problem for Google is that "compilations" in copyright law may be considered copyrightable even if the underlying data being compiled is not. The legal requirement is that the data needs to be "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship". (https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html)

As an example, individual recipes are generally not copyrightable, but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself would be copyrightable.

As applied to Java, even if individual method signatures like max/min/split/replace/delete/etc might not be copyrightable, the fact that you've organized those specific methods into specific classes named Math/String/File and then organized those classes into specific packages named java.lang and java.io might meet the threshold for copyrightability as a "compilation".

While it would likely not be good for the software industry for reasons discussed in this thread, I would not be particularly surprised if the court ruled in favor of Oracle on this particular subject.

warmfuzzykitten• 6 years ago

Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.

You're saying the textual contents of the interfaces that define the APIs are not part of the source code base? Of course Google copied them, or a nearly identical paraphrase of them.

I'm not quite sure what Google's legal theory is. Listening to the oral arguments this morning certainly didn't make that more clear to me. But I don't think it includes redefining what we mean by copying text.

And interfaces, in common parlance, are certainly lines of code.

Nor do I think Oracle's argument is that no one else can define interfaces that use the same words as in the Java standard library interfaces. read, write, get, put, etc. did not become Oracle's property by virtue of them being used as method names.

I have a bit of trouble with the concept "the threshhold of too much", too, as it applies to this case. Google copied or paraphrased essentially _all_ of the text of interfaces they used from Java libraries.

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

You're saying the textual contents of the interfaces that define the APIs are not part of the source code base? Of course Google copied them, or a nearly identical paraphrase of them.

Well, they aren't part of the implementation, since they just describe the interface. Google's theory is that interfaces, being needed for interoperability, are not protected by copyright. Google's alternate theory is that, even if they are protected by copyright, using them is fair use.

salawat6• 6 years ago

I have a bit of trouble with the concept "the threshhold of too much", too, as it applies to this case. Google copied or paraphrased essentially _all_ of the text of interfaces they used from Java libraries

Oracle is trying to argue that just because you intentionally left a bunch of implementation detail out because it isn't relevant toward transforming something like the Java API's to a new context, it should still count as copyright infringement because they Still yoinked everything they did take... Which seems circular to me.

Google's point is "no shit, Sherlock, it wouldn't be Java otherwise." Oracle is couching this issue from the perspective that Google should have invented a completely New language and runtime, absorbing the same costs of them doing so. Google argues, on the other hand, that what they made, in order to confer to the syntactic structure of the programming language known as Java, dictates the duplication of the organization of the fundamental functions, packages, and namespaces, and that furthermore, Oracle has no standing to call them on it, because those APIs are a necessary prerequite to drive the operation of the JVM, and are by definition the only way to do it, so that API constitutes a method of operation.

fomine32• 6 years ago

Nitpick: initially Windows implemented Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX controll, then Mozilla implemented XMLHTTPRequest

shmerl• 6 years ago

APIs shouldn't be copyrightable. European courts got that right.

bosswipe• 6 years ago

It's shocking to me that two jury trials spent months considering arguments from lawyers and experts from all sides and carefully came to a decision only to have the appeals court throw that all away and impose the opposite ruling, twice. What was the point of the trials? I don't know why the Federal Circuit court is so biased towards maximalist interpretations of IP law but I really hope the Supreme Court slaps it down hard. Again.

belorn6• 6 years ago

The Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982 did that. District judges are about geographical boundaries and need to make decisions about every kind of subject area, but Federal Circuit court judges operate based on subject area. That way a patent lawyer that want to be a judge handling patents can go to the Federal Circuit court, and unsurprising a very large portion of Federal Circuit court judges are past lawyers working in industry with companies within the same subject area. As a result it is not very strange that a court packed with past IP lawyers are biased towards maximalist interpretations of IP law.

ford_o2• 6 years ago

What happens if I expose a Java FFI ( i.e. thin wrapper around Java stdlib) in my toy language. Do I break their license?

gpm8• 6 years ago

It would be a derivative work of the api, so per Oracle's argument you would be violating their copyright absent a license. (You could use the gpl OpenJDK license if your code was GPLed, I think).

You could try and argue fair use, and it would be distinct from the case at hand so you might win, but fair use is always a fact intensive analysis and it's certainly not obvious that you would win.

kevin_b_er3• 6 years ago

You'll need a license for that if APIs are now copyrightable.

Your toy language cannot read the API information into memory to compile with it, because that would be copying it.

jariel• 6 years ago

Does anyone have any indication as to how long the ruling will take for this? It's not articulated and this is a very big ruling.

capital_guy• 6 years ago

Could happen any time until June 2021

jcranmer8• 6 years ago

For a case argued in October, a quick decision for a 9-0 case (or I guess 8-0 in the current court) that involves settling a circuit split or something else that's just simple textual analysis would come out in late November or December.

This is probably going to be complicated. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 8-0 outcome, but there's likely to be a concurring opinion or two, which will make the decision take longer. My expectation is that the opinion will come out in the January-March timeframe.

By way of comparison, Bilski v Kappos (the first big patent case in recent years) was a 9-0 case argued in November whose opinions only came out in the end-of-year opinion blitz.

tiffanyh• 6 years ago

Question: so if Oracle wins, does that mean no one can create compatible APIs in general?

I know a lot of folks have created compatible APIs for Amazon S3, including Oracle themselves.

Does this become against the law if Oracle wins?

https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...

coldpie7• 6 years ago

Sort of. Copyright is a civil matter, not criminal, so it requires two to tango. What I mean is, you can copy the API, but then the creator can choose to sue you. Or not. It turns our mostly-open computing landscape into a stand-off, exactly like the current software patent situation. The big guys have all the guns to hold each other off, but they can all take out the small guys who threaten them.

gpm8• 6 years ago

frant-hartm• 6 years ago

AWS SDK is under Apache 2 license, so anyone is able to use it (suppose you comply with the license - attribution etc..).

Google did a similar thing with OpenJDK (which is GPL) starting with Android N, why they didn't do it in the first place I don't know, Sun published OpenJDK under GPL in 2007, first 1.0 Android release was in 2008.

gpm8• 6 years ago

Though for the purposes of this case it is interesting to note that oracle did copy the aww api and did not comply with the apache 2 license (nothing, including distributed derivative works like their api documents, contains attribution).

ford_o2• 6 years ago

And what about FFI?

bitL4• 6 years ago

If Google paid some reasonable sum to SUN for using Java in Android, they could have avoided all of this. I bet their lawsuit expenses are now higher.

Zigurd4• 6 years ago

Having been across the table from Sun licensing people when using an open source Java in a project, "some reasonable sum" is optimistic. In fact any transparency about what sum they might demand is optimistic.

bitL4• 6 years ago

AFAIK they were pretty open to some reasonable sum as they were internally fans of Google, but due to Google's arrogance the upper management relationship with them soured, then opportunistic Oracle bought them and here we are.

pjmlp21• 6 years ago

Better, they could actually have bought Sun and own Java, after torpedoing it with their actions.

byte1918• 6 years ago

I was making an analogy in my mind between API function names and song titles. IANAL but I thought at first that it doesn't make sense to copyright song titles, they are generic and uninteresting most of the time but after giving it further consideration I realized that some can be quite meaningful, for instance everyone recognizes 'Stairway to heaven' and 'Bohemian rhapsody' therefore, even though it seems a bit silly I wouldn't be surprised if those song titles are in fact copyrighted which could mean copyrighting function names is not that different. I then decided to actually google this and found out that:

Generally, copyright law protection does not extend to song titles because they usually are short and lack sufficient originality. Therefore, you can (and often do) have multiple songs with the same name, and the first to name their song, for example "Crazy," does not have the right to stop other people from releasing their own songs named "Crazy." An exception to this is that some long titles may be found to have sufficient originality to be afforded copyright protection. I suspect that my friend's song entitled "The Concept of the Quantum-Mechanical Bodymind Has Sparked a Great Idea" is one of them. [1]

The whole article from [1] is worth reading. I wouldn't be surprised if the final verdict will be similar to song title laws from the music industry.

[1] http://www.askamusiclawyer.com/archive/is-my-song-title-prot...

bitwize6• 6 years ago

If the Supreme Court does not find in favor of Oracle, it could undermine the basis for copyright law entirely. Google copied Oracle's code. The CAFC found, correctly, that API declarations are as expressive and protectable by copyright, as any other code. Therefore, finding that the Java APIs are not covered by copyright, or that copying them was fair use, undermines copyright entirely: if the unique expression of those Java APIs are not protectable by copyright, what is?

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

Literally everything else? That's like saying that if the table of contents and index are't copyrighted, what is? Um, the entire rest of the book?

bitwize6• 6 years ago

If you cannot build a case for protecting the significant creativity and unique expression in the design of an API, then there is little you can build a case for copyrighting.

If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and seek a carve-out exception in statute. Asking the courts to affirm what they assume to be the case undermines all of copyright. I know some Hackernews are okay with that, but I have friends and family who are artists and musicians, and they want to be able to put food on the table doing what they love.

dragonwriter18• 6 years ago

If the Supreme Court does not find in favor of Oracle, it could undermine the basis for copyright law entirely.

If the Supreme Court does not find in favor of Google, it most likely will do so by finding that the trial jury acted reasonably (not necessarily correctly -- because the litigants have a Constitutional right to a jury trial, judges or appellate courts aren't Constitutionally, or under the Rules of Civil Procedure, supposed to substitute their judgement of correctness as long as a jury could reasonably conclude as it did from the evidence) that Google's use was Fair Use, and that the CAFC was wrong to negate the jury verdict and act as the jury itself.

Now, sure, the Court could reach Google's copyrightability argument on APIs, but its a stretch to assume it would.

And even if it did, ruling that APIs are functional elements not subject to copyright for that reason would not "undermine the basis of copyright law entirely". It might weaken the basis for copyright applied to computer programs entirely, but that's a very different thing.

if the unique expression of those Java APIs are not protectable by copyright

In order for use to be "fair use", the thing used must, in fact, be protectable by copyright.

dlandis• 6 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the decision is very narrow in this case or if it is even postponed again until there is a ninth justice. But I have a bad feeling it will be decided in favor of Oracle, since considering specific APIs part of the "idea" rather than the expression seems to be more of a convention among software engineers rather than actually part of the law. APIs can be "expressions", after all, it just depends on how literal or pedantic you want to be in your reading of the law. The real solution seems like it would be to update the outdated law.

gpm8• 6 years ago

If they decide it narrowly I bet they overturn the federal circuits decision to override the jury (constitutional right to a jury trial, oracle waived the argument about a court ruling on legal aspects of free use when they agreed to the jury instructions) and leave all the interesting legal questions open.

josaka• 6 years ago

Highly recommend listening to oral arguments once posted on Oyez: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/u-s-supreme-court-oral...

gjsman-1000• 6 years ago

What may throw Oracle for a loop is that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was considered in legal circles to have a strong view of property rights and many people I've read online considered her to be a near-certain vote for Oracle. Her death makes this a much less certain Oracle victory.

To quote The Verge:

"The absolute least important part of Ginsburg’s legacy is that she was the most reliable vote in copyright law cases, tending to vote in favor of rights-holders. Her loss also means that Google v. Oracle is being heard by eight justices and is therefore prone to a split court. (In the 1996 software copyright case Lotus v. Borland, an eight-justice court split evenly and was unable to set national precedent)."

Zigurd4• 6 years ago

Oracle is pursuing a dubious interpretation of copyright that puts the entire software industry at risk of chaos. This is deeply irresponsible, and would be irresponsible even if Oracle's theory had a leg to stand on. And nevermind software, allowing Oracle's position to prevail would call into question the legality of every set of facts that are freely used across many knowledge domains.

pjmlp21• 6 years ago

Time to squash Google's own J++ variant, they can keep playing with Kotlin if they are so keen, and buy JetBrains while at it.

And before the IBM example comes up, SQL is an ISO standard, that Oracle like every RDMS vendor pays for.

loourr• 6 years ago

This author clearly does not understand software

us0r• 6 years ago

If anyone is interested in hearing:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri...

partingshots• 6 years ago

Why does Oracle care so much about Android in the first place? Does it even make any money for Google?

AnimalMuppet8• 6 years ago

It can make a lot of money for Oracle (by suing Google). That, and only that, is why Oracle cares.

monocasa10• 6 years ago

It's deeper than that. Ellison and Jobs were best friends (to the point that they could be seen in public occasionally wearing matching best friends tshirts).

Jobs died thinking that Android (and particularly Eric Schmidt's part in sitting on the Apple board while Android was being cooked up at Google) was a personal affront to his magnum opus of iPhone, and the rumor is that Ellison agreed to hurt Android any way he could more or less without regard for the costs.

raphlinus• 6 years ago

My wish is that this case be decided clearly. Either APIs can be copyrighted, or they cannot. Either outcome has potentially good consequences, for open source in particular.

Obviously if APIs cannot be copyrighted, then a ton of open source work geared towards making things compatible remains viable. Wine is one of the most obvious, but I can think of many others. Efforts to port CUDA code to non-Nvidia hardware. A potential effort to reimplement SwiftUI. And there are many more.

On the other hand, if APIs can be copyrighted, then buyers now know that there's a single-source risk for any API that's not released under a permissive open source license. So, to continue this example, Apple has the legal right to shut down any port of code written in SwiftUI to non-Apple hardware, and similarly for CUDA. This would immediately increase interest in actually open source alternatives; Flutter already exists, a Vulkan based runtime could be developed for TensorFlow, etc.

Sadly, I think this outcome is unlikely. What's more likely is that the ruling will be specific to the facts of the case. That basically means that there won't be clear guidance that you need to run away from proprietary APIs, but also not clear guidance that you can continue to rely on open source interop projects. Rather, any time any of this gets sticky, the only way through the mess will be to pay lawyers millions of dollars. That will have the effect of making it easier for the big players to dominate the market further, and harder for independent people to play. That's very much to the advantage of those in power, so I'm pretty sure that's what we'll see.

CobrastanJorji5• 6 years ago

If APIs can be copyrighted, then buyers now know that there's a single-source risk for any API that's not released under a permissive open source license.

Buyers won't be very motivated to care because they are consuming the original product, not competing with it. The first mover to release an API frequently has no interest in allowing compatible, competing offerings to exist. It's the second mover, the competition, that desperately wants to be compatible with the first offering, so that they can effectively compete for the business of the customer who bought the original product.

causality0• 6 years ago

Does oracle actually have any function besides vampirically draining tech companies of money?

CobrastanJorji5• 6 years ago

I have what's maybe a stupid question, but this is a stupid issue, so let's give it a whirl.

If writing Java programs is okay, but the issue is copying the API, would it be okay to take 10,000 popular Java programs, read through their byte code, and use that to construct a set of classes and functions that those programs would need to run? It would, of course, be a nearly complete subset of the Java API, but it would be produced without any reference to the Java API itself. Instead, it'd be produced simply by examining programs you wanted to support.

dylan-m• 6 years ago

That's the argument that always springs to mind for me, as well, and I'm curious why Google's lawyers haven't used it since it seems obvious. (That's the whole point of this, after all: we're implementing an agreed-upon interface that application developers are using. Implementing an interface happens all the time outside of computers and is not a difficult concept to turn into shitty car metaphors if you really must).

So, the interface is published in every consuming application. If you look at an application which is missing a shared object and figure out how to implement the missing pieces in your own version of that shared object, you've re-implemented (part of) an API. So the question is, in doing so, have you infringed their copyright?

jcranmer8• 6 years ago

Oral arguments have already happened: https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri...

I wasn't able to listen to all of the arguments, but some general takeaways I had:

* The justices seemed to be asking mostly technical legal questions of Google (e.g., discuss merger doctrine) and mostly doom-and-gloom questions of Oracle (e.g., how does your argument impact QWERTY keyboards?). This suggests to me that they're more in favor of Google's position, and are querying how to arrive at that decision from a legal basis.

* Some of the questions suggest to me that the justices agree with Google's view that declaring code is categorically distinct from implementation code, and perhaps that copyright for the former doesn't exist.

* Thomas had an interesting question that went unanswered: "the four factors to determine fair use are not exhaustive, can you think of any other factors?" (paraphrased).

foota2• 6 years ago

Huh, that last note is pretty interesting. You seem pretty tuned in, do you know when we might be able to expect a written decision?

jcranmer8• 6 years ago

The decision can theoretically come anytime between now and the end of next June, largely dependent on how complex the decision is. My personal guess is somewhere between January and March of next year.

AmericanChopper• 6 years ago

This suggests to me that they're more in favor of Google's position, and are querying how to arrive at that decision from a legal basis.

I wouldn't read that much into it. Google has made the argument that "this means doom-and-gloom" and Oracle that "this is technically illegal". It makes sense that they're interrogating the parties along the lines of the arguments that have been presented. I wouldn't say it's a signal that they favor one over the other.

bitwize6• 6 years ago

The expert to turn to in cases like this is Florian Mueller. While everybody else insisted the Alsup ruling was a slam dunk for Google and would settle API copyrightability once and for all, Mueller insisted that Oracle would win on appeal -- and they did.

Mueller is now telling us that the Court will find for Oracle in a near-unanimous, if not actually unanimous, decision: http://www.fosspatents.com/2020/10/supreme-court-inclined-to...

He points out that the justices have been asking some really pointed questions of Google since you made this post, questions which suggest that they don't buy Google's crap for a second and they think Google is trying to pull a fast one.

The law is pretty unambiguous that Google is liable for copyright infringement. Just because techies thought the law didn't work the way it does for decades doesn't actually change anything.

anigbrowl• 6 years ago

Sigh...I've been commenting on this case almost as long as I've been on HN. At this point I enjoy fantasizing about a coronal mass ejection causing an electrical storm that would obviate everything to do with it. Well, there's always n-gate.

nimish3• 6 years ago

The solution here is to pass a law that exempts APIs from copyright, not to rely on a geriatric body of lawyers to interpret laws not designed around technology

gpm8• 6 years ago

The current law does exempt APIs from copyright via sensible general principles (you can't copyright functional things, which as applied in this case is known as the merger doctrine).

If the court gets it wrong congress should fix it, but ideally we don't want a law that is a patchwork of tiny little exceptions because that fails to generalize to new things, so we would rather that the court just properly understands how to apply general principles.

Even if the court gets it wrong, my favored way of fixing it would be to modify the general principle to be less ambiguous to this case, not to explicitly make an api exception.

nimish3• 6 years ago

SCOTUS interpretation of an act is case law.

With a single legislative act, we need not worry about this or anything else, modulo constitutional issues which can also be fixed via amendments.

No, it is not obvious that API is a "functional thing" covered by existing law by the mere fact that SCOTUS has taken it on and it was a case to begin with.

I'm not sure why a trivial act of congress isn't the first thing we jump to rather than risk ruin. All the act needs to do is clarify what copyright means.

A copyright act for the digital millenium, if you will -- you can call it DMCA 2.0 :)

dragonwriter18• 6 years ago

The solution here is to pass a law that exempts APIs from copyright

But APIs were never included, explicitly, in copyright in the first place. Why do they need to be explicitly excluded?

nimish3• 6 years ago

So we do not have to have a decade of a case that could be rendered moot with a single act.

tony• 6 years ago

Transcript: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...

Oral argument: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/audio/2020/18-95...

Oyez hasn't posted it yet, but it'd be up here later: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/18-956

vaccinator2• 6 years ago

Lol Google the copyright infringment master... Stealing important bits and posting them in the search results.

iamgopal• 6 years ago

Can't google just buy Oracle, and done with this bullshit ? And at the same time land opportunity to move all their enterprise customers to cloud ?

amaajemyfren• 6 years ago

This gives me memories of SCO Linux.

teruakohatu• 6 years ago

I wonder what the impact will be on free/GPL compatible ZFS implementations. If Oracle wins this they won't hesitate to weaponize the ruling.

Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

Related Stories