I'm not sure why so many people here seem to be surprised by this, I got the exact same impression from the hearing.<p>The problem for Google on the copyrightability front is that "compilations" of non-copyrightable items can be copyrightable even if the underlying items themselves are not, if the "selection, coordination, or arrangement" of those items involves sufficient creativity to be considered an "original work of authorship".<p>For example, individual recipes are generally not copyrightable, but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.<p>As applied to Java, individual method signatures like <i>min</i> and <i>max</i> might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and organize those individual methods into classes, and organize those classes into packages. That act of organization likely implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures are not.<p>What's worse for Google is that code has always been considered copyrightable so arguing that APIs are non-copyrightable is essentially carving out an exception for a specific type of code.<p>As is common when HN discusses legal matters I see a lot of people blaming the judges for not understanding tech, but the problem here isn't really the judges so much as the law itself. We should not be surprised if Oracle ends up winning here, at least on the question of copyrightability. Google may have an out related to fair use, but that seems like a long shot as well.
Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to do something new would be wise to build on top of software they are at least assured will not be used against them in court should they find success building ontop of it.
> Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible to teach them the difference between interface and implementation within the parameters of these arguments.<p>I mostly agree with you, but let's give credit where credit is due. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, from TFA:<p>> "[...] since 1992, [courts have said] the application-programming interface, of which the declaring code is a part, is not copyrightable. Implementing codes are. On that understanding, industries have built up around applications that know they can copy only what's necessary to run on the application, but they have to change everything else. That's what Google did here. That's why they took less than 1 percent of the Java code... Everybody knows that APIs, declaring codes, are not copyrightable. Implementing codes are. So please explain to me why we should now upend what the industry has viewed as the copyrightable elements, and has declared that some are methods of operation, and some are expressions. "
This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a disaster for software everywhere. If APIs become copyrightable, what happens to any open source software the implements a proprietary API?<p>Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible to teach them the difference between interface and implementation within the parameters of these arguments. And beyond that the conservative majority is predisposed to treat everything as property. This is not going to end well.
I saw one question from Gorsuch quoted in reports about the arguments that bothered me: "What do we do about the fact that the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging in this kind of copying?"<p>macOS and iOS (and indeed Apple itself) would not exist as we know them today, if at all, without very liberal cross pollination of APIs. In a parallel universe where APIs are copyrighted to the extent that Oracle wants, GNU would not exist. Konqueror and Safari could not use Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest(). The list goes on and on.
Maybe we get lucky and the SCOTUS ruling comes down against uncopyable API's. But while that seems questionable at the moment, it's important to remember one thing: there is always an "out" even in the "nuclear option" case and that is "have Congress change the law".<p>It seems to me that now is the time to start thinking about putting together a mass effort to get Congress to change copyright law, to establish clearly the semantic distinction between API and implementation, and to make it clear that the API part can be "copied" in the name of interoperability.<p>No, that's not an easy thing to accomplish, especially without armies of highly paid lobbyists, but I'm guessing that a few big companies - like <i>cough</i> Google <i>cough</i> might be interested in supporting such an effort.
This isn't just a disaster for Google. This is a disaster for competition in the tech industry and a disaster for consumers. If APIs can be copyrighted, what's next? File formats? On-the-wire protocols?
The linked Ars article is excellent, and it's a reminder of how much better Timothy Lee is at covering these issues than the people who cover them for major newspapers. For example, compare his article to the Times article on the same case: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/us/supreme-court-google-oracle.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/us/supreme-court-google-o...</a>.<p>It's not enough to say that Lee is writing for a specialized audience while the Times caters to a more general audience. Even after accounting for that, Lee's coverage of the case is superior.
> This is a widespread practice in the software industry. Oracle, for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to Oracle's rival cloud platform.<p>Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
To me the best explanation of an Application Programming Interface (spelling it out on purpose) is really the comparison with industrial machinery. It's really the switches, knobs and levers of a machine that you use to make it do something. I get it that an API being textual throws non-technical people off. But for a programmer functionally there's not much difference between a physical object, like a steering wheel, and some API call to invoke. They are both just something you use to interact with the underlying system. Hence the term.<p>It's sort of perplexing that Google would send someone who can't explain this point of view well.
It is absurd that "judges" should be in the position to judge issues which they have no understanding of. I would bet that at least some of the members of the Supreme Court do not even know how to check and send email. In the same way they depend on others to perform basic and advanced computer tasks, they should depend on a "jury" of tech experts to filter the cases and provide suggestions or hopefully reasonable analogies to concepts the judges can comprehend.<p>But now, on the topic of copyrighting APIs... it's stupid, and it's protectionist, and it's the kind of thing a company does when they can't compete or want to try to block competition. Most types of copyright are bogus for the same reasons. Not only is there the strong possibility of more than one person coming up with the same idea at approximately the same time, in different places, but very few ideas are truly unique or revolutionary. Instead, it becomes a race to see who can copyright (or patent) something first - either defensively or with future hopes of preventing competition or extracting payment from a competitor.<p>If modern copyright and patent law had always existed, humanity would be decades or perhaps centuries behind where it is now.
I'd highly encourage anyone interested in this case to hear the oral arguments for themselves, you can listen to them here: <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-america-oral-argument" rel="nofollow">https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri...</a><p>While I believe that it would be better for society if the court sides with Google, I personally think that APIs can be a creative work, and thus would have copyright protection under the law. However one of Google's arguments is that Oracle is trying to use copyright to acquire a patent-like right, referencing the case of Baker v. Selden[0]. Despite being from 1879(!) I found this case to be especially relevant and I'm quite interested to see how the court will consider it into their opinion.<p>In his arguments, Oracle's lawyer argues that declaring code is not distinguishable from implementing code and thus deserves all the same copyright protections. As a programmer I find this argument quite unconvincing, as there is clearly a technical distinction in many systems, see: .h files, dynamic linking, etc.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Selden" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Selden</a>
> This is a widespread practice in the software industry. Oracle, for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to Oracle's rival cloud platform.<p>Oracle themselves are doing it, could someone with a better legal mind explain to me how this doesn't make the case simpler to decide?<p>Is it that they're saying, it should be illegal but since it is not we are playing the game by the current rules, but we hope to change those rules?
I wonder if Oracle winning would reinvigorate software developement - by which I mean, maybe the resulting fragmentation would leave a lot of room for new ideas to be developed.<p>e.g.: if this court case was decided before Google made Android, then Google would have had to use something other than Java to do it and they wouldn't have been able to attract such a large developer base to make apps. Maybe they would have come up with a new language, or reused whatever else was viable at the time. But, maybe their OS wouldn't have been so overwhelming in its popularity and other OSes, like PalmOS and the windows phone OS, could have remained alive today. I think there's a lot of people, maybe the majority, who would agree that Android's UI was inferior to one or both of those alternatives.<p>e.g. #2: looking to the future, the resulting fragmentation could mean that even new OSes will have to be developed (edit - since even kernel APIs could be covered by copyright). That could be pretty bad for open source and hacking in general - except that as another poster has pointed out, closed-down software might turn out to be pretty useless compared to open-source. Maybe Oracle winning could be a really good thing for reinvigorating the development of new paradigms in software.
Breyer might be my new hero:<p><i>In fact, a couple of justices did a better job articulating Google's position than Google's own lawyer.<p>"It's like the QWERTY keyboard," Breyer said in a question to Oracle's lawyer. "You didn't have to have a QWERTY keyboard on typewriters in the beginning. But my God, if you let somebody have a copyright on that now, they would control all typewriters, which really has nothing to do with copyright"</i>
> Jonathan Schwartz's (CEO of Sun when Google re-implemented the Java APIs):<p>> "Google's lawyer, Robert van Nest, asked Schwartz whether, during his tenure at Sun, Java APIs were considered proprietary or protected by Sun."<p>> "'No,' Schwartz said in explaining the nature of open software. 'These are open APIs, and we wanted to bring in more people...we wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as possible.'"<p>I feel like I would raise this fact repeatedly, if i was trying to make my case.
« For decades prior to Oracle's lawsuit, most people in the software industry assumed that APIs couldn't be copyrighted. »<p>Well, what were they supposed to assume?<p>It's shameful that it's been 40 years since computer programs were explicitly protected in the US under copyright law, and this remains an unsettled question.<p>This situation is an extremely poor advertisement for the practice of passing vague laws and letting their boundaries be settled over time by court cases and precedent.<p>It's painful to have to listen to lawyers argue by an analogy between function declarations and Harry Potter chapter titles.
This is not good...not good at all!<p>If Oracle wins, to me with zero knowledge around copyright laws and legalese topics, means small to medium companies will close down out of fear of getting sued for using or implementing a competitor's APIs.<p>Not only that, it feels like the whole technological "civilization" will collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating, because thousands of people will lose their job simply because companies will prefer to close down than go to court with huge companies the size of IBM, Amazon, Alphabet, and Oracle to name a few, and that thought alone lead to financial meltdown...as if we didn't have enough problems already with the pandemic!<p>If we continue like this, it would feel like living in "Minority Report", that we could get sued for simply thinking about implementing a competitor's API!<p>On the positive side, I'm quite curious to see where this could go.
Where are the expert witnesses in this case?? Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion??<p>I put myself in their shoes, if I had never looked at a line of code I couldn't even start to imagine what an API vs real code is. I'd probably think it's some made up concept that Google is using to save money and circumvent the law.
This article really overstates the case by focusing on copyrightability while leaving fair use for a tag at the end.<p>Winning on fair use is not a disaster for Google. Google winning on fair use on procedural grounds, if the Court uses that as an excuse not to even answer the copyrightability question (the narrowest possible grounds for a Google victory), does not, contrary to the article's claim that "a Google win on a narrow procedural question would create a lot of legal uncertainty in the software industry", create any <i>new</i> legal uncertainty for the industry.
Does anyone have any idea, if Oracle wins, what the ramifications for Google/Android will be?<p>Because Android is so entrenched, there's no "going back". Google merely paying a fine doesn't change the fact it's still using Java API's moving forwards. Google would have to license the Java API from Oracle... but then who sets the price? Oracle could set something absurdly 1000x higher than reasonable by holding the entire Android ecosystem hostage, no? Would the court decide not just penalties for past usage, but a negotiation for future usage? How would they determine that? (And if they did, couldn't that create a moral hazard? Companies steal IP from someone who refuses to sell, get "too big to fail", and get to keep the stolen IP in the end.)<p>I'm not familiar with how the law relates to ongoing conflicts that are so massive they can't be undone without great harm to individuals and businesses far beyond the actual parties in dispute.
The article mentions that Google faced some tough questions on their merger doctrine argument (that because there was only one way to implement the declaring code Oracle can’t preclude Google from reusing it) but it doesn’t really mention the fact that Oracle faced much tougher questioning on their procedural argument that the Federal Circuit correctly overturned the district court jury decision.<p>Listening to the oral arguments I have a hard time counting to 5 either way on the issue of API copyright and Google’s merger doctrine argument, but I think it’s quite likely that there are 5 votes to send the case back to the Federal Circuit with instructions to take another look at fair use.<p>Essentially, the district court jury found in favor of Google on fair use and the Federal Circuit set that verdict aside on the grounds that no reasonable person could conclude there was fair use. None of the justices sounded happy about that.
I am really not up on copyright law, but I see this as analogous to someone writing a book. Say I wrote a book and titled all of my chapters the same as another book, the book was given a different title and the chapters themselves where very different on the inside but naturally my table of contents looks exactly the same, would this be considered infringe in the publishing world (I don't know)?<p>Also based on that:<p>If it would why would API's be different?<p>If not how was it applied differently here?<p>What if in the above scenario, I added some extra chapters so the TOC has all the chapters the other book had, but the TOC is not a 1 for 1?<p>If my analogy is wrong, what am I not seeing?<p>I know as someone who writes software, API's not being copyrightable is preferable, but I would like to understand how the law sees it when dealing with real physicals works and understand if the law is applied the same when it moves to less concrete works.
For me a good analogy to API is driving a car. The interface (API) to the car is the steering wheel, the pedals, and some common controls like signals and the horn.<p>You only need to learn to drive one car, and you can drive them all. But under the hood the cars are completely different. Gas, diesel, battery, hybrid, all have the same API, yet no one says that you copied a car if it has a steering wheel.<p>One could probably reinvent the (steering) wheel and possibly make a better interface to the car, but that would result in people having to learn how to drive your car specifically.
We all seem to assume that there is an obviousness defence, because we are like fish and water.<p>And it makes a degree of sense - take the articles example lang.java.math.sum - there are a limited number of ways "adding up an array" can be expressed in English. All of which are obvious and based around domain jargon - all very hard to copyright.<p>However what interests me about this case is how fast it all unravels<p>Is this about the math.sum part of about the lang.java part? It cannot be the math.sum because then every other language from Rust to Python gets clobbered.<p>If it is about the lang.java then hey maybe Oracle has a point. But it only means "you cannot copy lang.java.math.sum and that surely is an accident of language design - for example in Python the same call is math.isinf. That's the part used in the code that I write, that's the import signature. The API.<p>So from my pov this should be a very narrow ruling - if the import signature is not obvious and is unique (lang.java.x) then yeah fine Google, they stole your developers.<p>I also wonder about how transferable the obvious part is - math.ist_unendlich is fine for german speakers. Is that obvious if the rest of the manual is in English?<p>And if Google had gone for lang.gava.math.sum (don't tell me it was not at least discussed :-)?<p>It does overall seem a big fuss over a small hill of beans. If the supreme court rules in a narrow and well defined manner they just move the industry in favour of open and free, in a broad and badly defined manner they move the industry off US shores. Neither side is that bad for the software world
I started reading this article today thinking that the case was clear-cut - Oracle's wrong and Google is right. As I read the article and the comments I'm now not at all sure. We all are trying to come up with a good analogy to explain why APIs are distinct from implementations, why it's 'obvious' to a programmer how they're distinct, and how their rules should be distinct.<p>But the more I think about it, and read feeble attempts to relate software to other industries, I am starting to think I was wrong. In my experience, especially where good design is encouraged and respected, I can spend far more time designing the API than implementing it! If I create a proprietary API shouldn't it be protected? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the debate?
>Oracle, for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to Oracle's rival cloud platform.<p>So if Oracle wins here, they will get fu<i>xx</i>ed by Amazon?
No one's discussed Lotus v. Borland yet.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int%27l,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In...</a>.<p>The issue was that the Borland Quattro spreadsheet had the ability to emulate the menu hierarchy of Lotus 1-2-3.<p>So the SCOTUS was asked to weigh in on whether a software menu system represents a copyrightable expression of an idea.<p>What ended up happening was one justice recused himself and the eight remaining members were evenly split.<p>In essence, they threw up their hands and gave up. It may as well have been a coin toss.
It would be initially problematic, but I do not believe that an Oracle win would be that disruptive in the long run. What would happen is that API providers would from now on have to provide standardized legal assurances that users are allowed to implement their API (in part or in whole). APIs that do not provide these assurances will go mostly unused.<p>As an imperfect analogy, think about the fact that many companies no longer want to use GPL code because of the legal ramifications. Open source authors would want their code used at those places use other licenses such as MIT.
Happy who lives in a country where reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed by law. So do we have to expect more economic refugees from the USA in Europe in the future?
Alito/Thomas/Kavanaugh are clearly on the wrong side of this, big freaking surprise there. If Oracle wins this is going to be catastrophic for our whole industry (in the US at least). Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
The big question here is the distinction between standard and API.<p>If Java is also a standard, then laws applicable to all sorts of standards apply. And this could be a relatively good line of defense.<p>An API itself is not necessarily a standard. More importantly, a distinction would have to be made between a standard and its implementation.<p>Technical argument is whether API is procedural or textual. Procedures cannot be copyrighted only patented, including design patents and algorithm patents. But API itself is not procedural.<p>QWERTY sequence of letters is not necessarily copyrightable because it's not a document or result of machine processing of one and as such is a bad analogy.<p>An API actually has a source code and mechanically processed version.
Oracle publishes it as documentation, which is probably copyrighted, and Java source code, which was copyrighted until OpenJDK.<p>The trick here is to define minimum creativity required for copyrightable work. If the API is narrow and trivial, you probably cannot copyright it anyway. There is additonal trouble when said API has no meaning without an implementation or is not published.
Reverse engineering may be prohibited by a licence.
This decision doesn't change anything as long as software vendors use a permissive license.<p>The fear mongering about all sorts of cases in which might be affected (API, file formats) area under the assumption that the copyright holder has disallowed use which is the problem.<p>I suspect many will include provisions to allow it in their licenses otherwise the ecosystem for their products would shrink radically.
It’s always dangerous to try to read the tea leaves based on what questions the Justices ask. We really don’t know yet what they’re going to do. Anyone who says otherwise is mostly just guessing.
I thought that until I got to Google's closing remarks. They said that 1) the Federal Circuit didn't really do a <i>de novo</i> review like they said they did, and therefore that their overturning the jury didn't have the excuse that Oracle said it did, and 2) that Oracle was factually incorrect in several statements it made in the hearing. If those claims are accurate, Google is likely to at least win on fair use.
"copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years"<p>That's ridiculous for software APIs, I could be okay with APIs having some temporary copyright for a shorter amount of time, say 5 years, but that's just unreasonably too much.<p>Do we have any other technical fields where technical work fall under copyright? I feel that's the main issue, copyright was clearly designed for work of art and fiction.
If you have the source code for projects written in Java that collectively use every API endpoint in the standard library, you can reconstruct the API perfectly, thanks to static typing and the absence of type inference and default parameters. Would it be a copyright violation to distribute these projects along with a tool for reconstructing the API declarations from them?
I would make the argument that what distinguishes APIs from code is that APIs cannot be executed, they are not code because the computer cannot run it. And only code is copyrightable, code requires to be executable on some machine. Thus it is clear that only the implementation is copyrightable.<p>That said, at this point, I don't even care about the interpretation of the law, this issue has to just be addressed by the executive branch, truth be told, the rules should be explicitly stated, and I almost feel someone could make a case and sue the government with being so vague, allowing multi billion businesses to get built and a whole industry assuming they had the correct interpretation of the law, when in fact it gets interpreted differently. I don't know if this is possible to sue the government for, but like, how enraging is it if everyone for years clearly thinks they know the rules and all abide by some interpretation of it worth billions of dollars. Clearly the law needed to be revised a long time ago.
It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to figure out who can claim copyright to SQL, Posix, C, various assembly languages, HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP... pretty much everything. Are copyright trolls buying this stuff up yet? Seems like a whole new asset class is about to be invented.
This is the thing that really bothers me [from a comment in the post]:<p>> 2) Also realize that the SCOTUS' job is not to decide what's right, but to decide what's legal given the constraints and allowances of both the Constitution and law. Even if a Justice were to feel like copywriting APIs would have terrible knock-on effects, she would be compelled to rule in favor of granting them if she believed that the laws passed by Congress required it.<p>So much of the arguments were specific to the Google/Oracle incident and not as much about the implications except for the thing about QWERTY and perhaps some vague analogies. I thought at the SC level it should always consider 'terrible knock-on effects' and act accordingly considering but not strictly bound to what came before.
Trying to get up to speed on this whole issue .. but as a software engineer, I'm a little surprised APIs are not copyrightable. Putting aside the pedantically literal creative work that goes into documenting an API and naming functions, the chief engineering role of the API is,<p>- breaking the domain of work into well modeled types<p>- information hiding<p>- keeping dependencies together and/or variously keeping data dependencies apart<p>- leaving room for extensibility<p>- speed of operations<p>- and promoting the correct use i.e. single v. multi-threaded or one server vs. distributed<p>That's real work, and getting a "good API" i.e. recognized throughout industry as well adapted to the problem domain (say SQL for DB work) or copy-on-write for C++-strings almost always reflects a better implementation which bubbles into the API.
I bet if this goes through, the US will try to enforce a completely backwards view on the rest of the world in the name of profit. One can only hope that at least some countries will tell the US where to stick it with idiotic laws like that.<p>Absolute lunacy.
>Justice Clarence Thomas compared Google's copying of the Java APIs to a football team taking a rival's playbook.<p>Maybe it should be compared to English dictionary, where American English cannot use words from pre-existing British English.
It's strange that there's little of comparison of an API to a standard. (Think like ISO standards) as API is not a program itself, it's a rule-set how two programms can interoperate.<p>Patenting API's imo is like patenting a rule set for a game (say like football). Imagine someone patenting rules for a football and afterwards it's allowed only to play the game if you are "licensed" by the patent holder.<p>anyways- the Googles defense team seems bland. Not sure whether they really understand the idea of what API is and what's it's purpose and that API's textual representation is absolutely non-essential.
> To re-implement Java, Google needed to copy the names and argument types of functions like java.lang.Math.max.<p>If there are "copying" examples like this in the case, I am surprised it wasn't thrown out way earlier.
People are confused about the differences between creativity and copyrights. Is API design work creative? Absolutely yes. Is all creative work copyrightable? Not necessarily. Copyrights have to be limited to very specific categories of use in order to make sure the interests are balanced between copyright holders and the general public. Compatibility at the interface level or format level is one such example. Same thing nobody should be able to copyright that a car has 4 wheels and 2-4 doors. Same thing nobody should be able to claim copyrights for poems with 14 lines.
Why is this being pitched (in all the press I have seen) as a "google vs Oracle" fight? This is a direct attack on software development by Oracle, who will also suffer if they prevail in the courts.
From a technical perspective I have actually a hard time to argue what is an API, and what is 'normal code,' in particular because a lot of code uses internal interfaces and DSLs. However as an open source radical, I would lean in the opposite direction and argue that code shouldn't be copyrightable in the first place.<p>And actually I think a ruling that APIs are copyrightable would be very good for copy left licenses and languages described in open standards, because they would not leave on at the mercy of a single monopolist.
It seems the ideas of interfaces became lost in translation to the judges. The comparison to a football playbook showed that. A playbook would have more in common with a concrete implementation than this idea of standard specifications as "trade secrets". As long as they don't extend the language to break compatibility as Microsoft J++ did, I don't see anything wrong.<p>At the same time there needs to be dissolution within FAANG. Hopefully this loss will help that instead of putting strain on the developer community.
Reading the article I get a feeling that the judges don't really understand what an API is.<p>Also, the comment
> I'm concerned that under your argument, all computer code is at risk of losing protection under 102(b)<p>It seems rather incorrect in case of reimplementing an API. It's not like the underlying logic has been changed or copied it's just that the top level API has been modified to be compatible with the system being used. Or am I missing something?
Google should have bought Sun. They would have been better custodians probably, and in the end Oracle will basically get it for free after this battle is over.
I'm wondering: Assuming Oracle wins on copyrightability, how will it affect BSD-licensed software? The license text just says<p>> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: [...]<p>But reimplementing the API is neither using the source code nor distributing it, so would it be covered or not?
It's not like all hinges on oral arguments. Lots of organizations informed the court in this case, about the issues at hand:<p><a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/18-956.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...</a>
Maybe someone should have bought out Sun and not let their crown jewels go to the most opportunistic company that's out there?<p>Could have avoided all of this and as a society we could have moved on an built better things. Only the lawyers won here.<p>Something for the current FAANG's to consider, buy the company that has goodwill but isn't doing well financially for various reasons.
For a different view of the same oral argument:<p>"Justices wary of upending tech industry in Google v. Oracle Supreme Court fight"<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/supreme-court-hears-google-v-oracle-software-copyright-case.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/supreme-court-hears-google-v...</a>
I think it will be a win-win situation no matter what. If Google loose, we will see an even bigger shift to FOSS, which is obviously a win for the whole developer community. If Oracle loose well then things stay as they are, we are still moving to FOSS but we don't have an Supreme Court accelerator behind that movement, still fine.
Lets Say that that Oracle wins. Does that mean that all 100+ companies who have copywrites on their software which all include "Helper.GetGUID" or "Calendar.NewMeeting" are going to sue each other to find out who the 1 true owner of the "Helper.GetGUID" API call is?
I haven't seen a single positive article about Google from ArsTechnica (and plenty of ones that were overly sensiationalistic, especially aroudn Android which I'm pretty familiar with professionally).<p>Is there any more independent media article describing what went on in the hearing?
Google broke compatibility with Java, so I don't think that the argument that this nullifies the right to reimplementation holds water.<p>If Android had been implemented in such a way as to allow pre-existing java applications to execute natively this would be a very different situation.
Remember that the idea that you can’t copyright an API is at the fundamental root of the PC revolution.<p>If IBM had been allowed a universal copyright on the API for its BIOS, it’s very likely you wouldn’t be reading this on the device you’re using today.
This would have protected the IBM PC BIOS wouldn't it? The BIOS interrupts are an API. Would it not also apply in retrospect? Could IBM not sue everyone who ever made a clone now? Or is there a statute of limitations?
Does anyone have any insight on why Google didn't buy Sun (which held a large patent portfolio)? It seemed an obvious move well before Oracle purchased them so I have no doubt that Google considered it.
Google should have acquired SUN.<p>I read somewhere that they were planning to but didn't due to SUN's hardware business. They should have sold that business off to another company and kept the software side of it.
If I copy a book's Table of Contents, but write the chapters myself, am I violating the original book's copyrights? Isn't it pretty much analogous to what's in contention here?
I'm curious if the Hush-A-Phone case is any precedent: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...</a> . It involved a company that made a device you connected to your telephone who got sued by AT&T and won. The compatibility with a proprietary phone network is vaguely analogous to an API.
Maybe this will persuade Google to use a better language that welcomes innovation (rust/c++) and frees them from Java commitments and they see past the sunk cost fallacy. It also displays why all companies should move away from Oracle and their totalitarian attitude and towards open source databases that respect their rights.
Further proof that the Supreme Court of the United States has been captured by right-wing ideologues who view every problem as having a solution in property rights. Why anyone in the US would think it's a good idea to change the foundations of the software industry — one of the few remaining bright spots in the US's sputtering economy — is beyond me. I guess in the end Americans will get what they deserve.
ITT:<p>1) Non-lawyers experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect
2) People not realising that Supreme Court appeals are 99% about the written submissions, with the oral hearing barely relevant to the final decision at all.
,,Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google''<p>I don't see how losing even a few billion dollars could be a disaster for Google at this point. They control most of the smart phones in the world, and that's worth much more than that amount of money (regardless of whether using Java was the right choice or not).