Did anyone here bother to check the bio's of the officials listed on the amicus brief? If so, you'd discover that the many (maybe most, I didn't count) were holdovers from previous administrations. But, conspiracy theories are fun, I guess.<p>Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.
This is the absolute reason why Dart, Flutter and Fuchsia exist. You can now imagine that if a loss from Google in this lawsuit were to happen, it would mean royalties in the billions for Oracle which Google won't pay for, or at least for a long time for Android.<p>So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.
IMO there's two ways to read this: either A) this is a baldly transparent attempt to "own the libs" and punish a company that the administration sees as a threat or B) they are too incompetent to understand the technical nuances of the case and are essentially morons. Maybe both? This administration can't be thrown out on their collective asses fast enough...
Question: if this lawsuit goes in Oracle's favor, what does that mean for WINE? Isn't that the same issue? WINE provides compatible Windows APIs.<p>Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)
> The administration found Google's policy arguments are "unpersuasive" and argued software code is copyrightable.<p>What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?
Of course they do. Some might point to Larry Ellison being a major supporter [1] but I think the real motivation is this plays into the narrative that Google is somehow biased against conservatives.<p>What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here:<p>1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now;<p>Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license?<p>2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-larry-ellison-to-cancel-trump-fundraiser-2020-02-18" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-l...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/</a>
I feel like in a normal presidential administration the support of the president is great for companies. With this administration it's a liability.
Is there any doubt that this is some kind of score-settling? Republicans <i>hate</i> Google. I don't think people inside the SV bubble appreciate just how intense this hatred has become. You know the seething, implacable anger, that bile that comes up out of your stomach when you think of a politician you don't like? A lot of republicans feel that way about Google.<p>This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true <i>doesn't matter</i> --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades.<p>Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".
For those commenting on the thread how Google hates Republicans, their PAC donates equally to both parties (technically a bit more to Reps):<p><a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623</a>
Wouldn't allowing weaponization of APIs via copyrights throw interoperability out of the window?<p>If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in <i>their own</i> tech sector.
WSJ had an interesting piece a week ago: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-the-flames-against-rival-tech-giants-11581615873" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-man-in-washington-fans-...</a><p>TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.
"The best democracy money can buy!" -Larry Ellison<p><a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google...</a>
Bribe the president: Definitely not ok. What sort of backwards ass country would allow that sort of thing?<p>Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all.<p>It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.
I so fear the law suits over every tiny interface.
push, pop,
insert, remove,
put, get, post, delete,
open, close, read, write, send, recv,
begin, end, next, prev,
find, filter, sort, groupby,
start, stop,
sqrt, log, exp.
Synonyms not allowed.
> The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun.<p>Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference).<p><a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-dont-need-anybodys-money/" rel="nofollow">https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-d...</a>
> At an earlier stage in litigation, the Obama administration took a similar position, urging the Supreme Court not to accept Google's appeal.<p>It seems the Trump administration position is not really all that different than the previous administrations.