This advise by the Solicitor General hinges on an interpretation of section 102(b) of the copyright act. That section essentially says that "methods of operation" can't be copyrighted.<p>The Solicitor General does not understand that APIs are a formalized description of "methods of operation" (page 14). I suggest reading the entire advisory, it's quite frustrating and contradicts itself.
> and likened the Java API’s to Charles Dickens and other literary works<p>Never, could have I ever predicted to one day see that as an actual excerpt from an article.<p>By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but <i>this</i> is what is important. /s
(Reposting a question I asked in an earlier discussion, where I may have arrived too late for anyone to see it).<p>That cases raises an interesting precedent issue that I have not been able to find the answer to. Let's assume that the Supreme Court decides not to take the appeal, so the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that APIs are copyrightable stands.<p>What courts is this precedent for?<p>Generally, the way precedent works is that if appeals from court X go to court Y, then the decisions of court Y are precedent for court X. If court Z is not on the appeals path from X, then the decisions of court Z are not binding precedent for X.<p>For copyright cases, appeals normally do NOT go to the CAFC. They go the Courts of Appeal for the circuit in which the court appealed from resides. E.g., copyright cases from district courts in the 2nd Circuit go to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.<p>In general, that is the appeals path from the Federal district court. Copyright cases aren't specifically singled out.<p>Oracle vs. Google was tried in the 9th Circuit. If it had just been a copyright case, the appeal would have went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, it was also a patent case, and patent cases are singled out. They are explicitly diverted from the normal appeals path and go to the CAFC. If the case is also some other kind of case, such as a copyright case or an antitrust case, the CAFC is allowed to hear those aspects too.<p>So does this mean that if P sues D in the 9th circuit over copyright, with no patent issues or any other issues that would bring the appeal to the CAFC, then the district court would only use the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for precedent (which I believe disagrees with CAFC), and ignore CAFC's Google vs. Oracle copyright ruling?<p>Even more confusing, suppose P sues D over copyright and patents in the 9th Circuit. The district court figures that the case, if appealed, will go to the CAFC, and so follows CAFC precedent for the copyright aspects. Now suppose after the court rules, neither party appeals the court's decisions on any of the patent issues. The only appeal copyright issues. Does the case still go to CAFC? Or does it go the 9th Circuit? If it goes to the 9th Circuit, do they apply their own copyright precedent or CAFC precedent?
Excuse me, non-American here, but a passage from an article linked within states[0]:<p>> The nine justices request that U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court, weigh in on about 20 cases a year in which the federal government has a strong interest. The justices generally give greater weight to what he or she says than other third parties that take a side in a case, an influence which has caused the solicitor general to be dubbed the "tenth justice."<p>Question: <i>what the fuck?</i><p><pre><code> [0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/google-oracle-lawsuit-idUSL1N0Y32YG20150515</code></pre>
Maybe we should change the standard licences - GPL, MIT, etc. - to include a caveat "free to use without restriction... except by companies known as, or ever known as, Oracle Corporation"...
"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" -- Article I, Section 8, US Constitution (<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...</a>)<p>This is the exact opposite of promoting progress, and this type of behavior needs to be overturned on constitutional grounds. This is so far beyond what the Constitution authorizes Congress to oversee with respect to patent and copyright law that the specifics of the case are almost meaningless. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that anyone would stop developing APIs or turn them into trade secrets unless they can be copyrighted. 40+ years of sharing and software development prove otherwise.<p>Time for the Federal Circuit and Justice Department to wake up, or for there to be an investigation into bribery and corruption in East Texas and DC. Preferably both.
And the more ironic here is that Google didn't copy Sun code, they used Apache Harmony implementation.<p>The ones doing the copy were the programmers from Apache Foundation
No suprise here ---
1) Google won the first case with Alsup. This demonstrates that some lower courts can have a better understanding of the law and are willing to spend time applying logic to these things.
2) Oracle won in a higher court. At this point, we see a trend that the higher you go, the more political and less competent the courts get. The DOJ's actions reinforce this trend too. So, even if it goes to the Supreme Court, we're pretty much guaranteed Oracle will win that too.<p>See, the whole problem of this case rests in that you have to "spend time" and "apply logic" to agree with Google's position. Which, pretty much throws out any hope of getting a "higher court" (or higher-anybody) to adopt Google's stance on the issue.<p>Actually the poster "tajen" pretty much hit the nail on the head for this issue -- essentially, adopting Google's stance unfortunately requires a degree of competence and logical commitment beyond the comprehension of most higher officials. So, even if this goes to the Supreme Court Oracle has this case pretty much won...
Why not let it happen? Why not just completely destroy everyone's understanding of how permission to use certain types of code work, and then force everyone to just abandon the US copyright system for software completely? Let this happen and just let it destroy the system from the inside out.
Seems ridiculous; my analogy: organization of volume of books; or classification of library; I can use any classification. I can go to Library of Congress; copy they way they organize their books; and implement same in my library. Why can't you do that with Open Source code?
I know this has been said a lot of times already but I don't think we can say this enough. If Oracle wins, this will set a terrible precedent for software development. If any software company deserves to be qualified as evil, it is Oracle without a doubt.
Can someone give the background of why Google did what they did? Did they want to block Java compatibility or was that a side effect of some other objective?
What happened of Judge Aslop [1]? As a foreigner, he's the only ever positive story I have heard about the American judicial system, since he was in charge of the Google vs Oracle trial, and he reproduced code himself to understand what was so unique about it. In fact, he decided there was only way to code some things, and ruled that the very small method everyone was arguing against can't be patented/copyrighted. And he ruled Oracle's API couldn't be copyrighted. So do this contradict his ruling?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-william-alsup-master-of-the-court-and-java/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-william-alsup-master-of-the-c...</a>
""[Google]'s Section 102(b) argument also suffers from a broader flaw." (this sentence transitions from the Administration's rejection of Google's suggestion that declaring code is inherently more functional and less expressive than implementing code to the DoJ's agreement with Oracle's lawyers on the purpose of Section 102(b))"<p>That Google would be in the right by copying the declaring code of 27(!) different namespaces is nothing but crazy.<p><a href="http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds-googles.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds-...</a>