Somehow we never had a thread on Oracle v. Google, but it’s now over, and Google has prevailed. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...ht-googles-copying-java-api-is-fair-use.shtml It’s not an exaggeration to say that this could have utterly wrecked the software industry if SCOTUS had sided with Oracle. They did only decide that Google’s reimplementation is fair use, rather than that APIs are uncopyrightable, as the trial court had decided (and they punted on that question), but I’ll take it.
Basically it is like Trump trying to copywrite the phrase "you're Fired." People will have a need to use that phrase to express themselves to others in english. Without that phrase your use of the english language would be inhibited. By copywriting APIs your use of the Java language would be so hampered because you would have to make a new API every time you wanted to say "You're Fired."
So I'm trying to understand this. Are APIs uncopyrightable because, for any given task, there's only one way to do it? Like if I'm making an app and I need it to make an API call to Google Maps for some function, and you're making an app that needs to do the same thing, you and I will end up writing exactly the same code because that's the only way for it to work?
No, they are, or should be, uncopyrightable for the same reason that the list of words in a dictionary (but not their definitions) is uncopyrightable. The implementations of those APIs are copyrightable because there are many ways to do it.
It may be either way from what I know. Like I was saying with the trump example. There are plenty of ways to say "You're fired," But the removal of that statement for a copywrite would be so limiting to how we use language you can't do it. Now, you can copywrite one of the trash books donald had written for him, and taking paragraphs and pages from his text would be plagiarism, but you cannot take that phrase out of the language because donald wants to own a couple of words. If you want a decent in depth description of how computer languages work even I cannot be that long winded. Even my knowledge of how the computer processes from programming languages people use to the instruction set your processor needs the data in is going to be a few pages of text, and I am not a programmer.
I think someone should a start a thread about something easier to understand, like the latest developments in quantum theory
Think of an API as a plug. For power or for data. In theory there's thousands of ways to accomplish what the plug does, but in practice, since we need things to be compatible at some level, we've settled on a handful of standard ones. Now imagine if General Electric suddenly decided that the standard two-prong electrical plug such as is used on almost all of our small appliances was their exclusive intellectual and copyrighted property. No-one can use that plug without paying GE for it. How well would that work out?
It is not as complicated as quantum physics, but it does take a fundamental understanding of the way programming works to understand why this would be so problematic that as a Java programmer you would drive to oracle headquarters and shoot them all for killing your language.
You would have to go a little step further and say your electricity would not work by just connecting the wires because your house would not understand what was happening.
Another way to look at it is that XYZ car company has been selling cars for years, then one day, somebody comes along, buys a car off the lot, makes a few minor tweaks to the engine, and handily begins winning every professional race that they enter. The carmaker, instead of saying, "Wow! We had no idea someone could do that, let's get together and figure out what we can do to make races more exciting for everyone!" says, "Nice, now pay us a percentage of your winnings for every race, even though you figured out something that we didn't, and you have people racing cars when we have no intention of doing anything like that." Or to put it another way, everyone who writes a SF story about aliens invading Earth owes a debt to HG Wells, but I think we can all agree that unless those stories involve Martians, tripods, and very specific points involving someone in England in the late 19th Century, the estate of Wells shouldn't get shit. Oracle is the estate of Wells demanding that every single SF story written after War of the Worlds that involves aliens invading Earth should cough up money, while the folks behind things like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Alien Nation says that the Wells estate needs to just go pound sand.
That helps some. At least I've got some idea of the concept. I'm afraid the nuts and bolts will remain forever out of my grasp. But thank you!
I would think at this point this sort of thing would be considered trumpian. How long did Jobs fuck Apple's market share with the apple tax? Intel made huge leaps in technology because they allowed things like clones to compete on their architecture. TCP/IP did not become the world's standard by making their routing functions ownable. You look at computer development and certain things need to remain open for others to use to make the technology more valuable to others. There are areas where you can make money, but you cannot charge for every little thing or else people will find some other way to do things. In the case of a programming language that would mean another vendor. The courts probably saved java with this ruling.
Interesting that you deflect away from the question of it it should be their intellectual and copyrighted property by referring to the negative consequences. Didn't expect you to be pulling out a "needs of the many outweigh the property rights of the few" argument.
It's an awkward case, IMO it should have ended up thus: The contract aspect - e.g. Method: Result DoSomething(SomeObject value); isn't copyrightable. The implementation aspect may be copyrightable. So, you wouldn't want string MakeSpecialString(string value) => format("{0}:{1}", 'speshul innit ', value) copyrightable But ProcessSomeShit(SomeShit value) => ComplexMappingAndMath(SomeConstant, SomeShit) would be if how ComplexMappingAndMath operates can be proven to be novel and have no prior art. Doesn't stop someone implementing ProcessSomeShit differently though. Oracle should never had had a leg to stand on on the interfacing aspect, but if Google had lifted any code directly, then yes, that should have been punished.
Pretty much, although there were apparently something like 13 implementation lines lifted directly, but the trial court found it to be de minimus and irrelevant, which is proper, given the total number of lines of code under consideration here.
