Slashdot Mirror
Does Google Pin Copyright Violations On the ASF?
An anonymous reader writes "Florian Mueller claims to have produced new evidence that he believes supports Oracle's case against Google on the copyright side of the lawsuit. Oracle originally presented one example to the court, and that file was found to have been part of older Android distributions, with an Apache license header. Mueller has just published six more files of that kind and believes the Apache Software Foundation will disown those just like the first one because those were never part of the Apache Harmony code base. Furthermore, various source files from the Sun Java Wireless Toolkit were found in the Android codebase, containing a total of 38 copyright notices that mark them as proprietary and confidential, but Google apparently published their source code regardless."
This post is proprietary and confidential. By accepting it, Slashdot agrees to not publish it to any third parties without my explicit permission. Violations of this contract will result in Commander Taco being legally bound to turn into a tunicate for not less than 36 hour greater than the duration at which this post is made available to any unauthorized third parties.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Another "anonymous" submission linking to this troll's blog? You know better than to feed the trolls slashdot...
If I publish a book that has a section with someone else's copyright notice printed in it, can I blame the person who holds that copyright for any issues it causes? And if not, why can Google do it?
Another example of what "do no evil" really means: if Google benefits it isn't evil, right? Pretty amazing and inept theft of IP on Google's part and for being this inept and stealing so blatantly, Oracle will get billions. Shame that we Android users will have to pay for Google's theft.
Using the apache software license is not the same as attributing code to the apache software foundation, you know just like people is not giving their copiright to Berkeley or MIT or the GNU project... Seriously, this is the second story from this troll in a couple of days... This is not even flamebait, if so at least I could enjoy the show, instead: why post it?
I have no idea what the hell the post title here has to do with the story. There's no indication that Google's blaming the ASF for anything, in any of the primary reporting on the story.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This is all getting SO stupid, copying a bit of text is NOT infringment so long as fair use is not exceeded, and if the text or the idea was already written that way, shoot or throw all the STUPID corporate f**kers and lawers and throw the bodies in the Charles River, along with the Tea chests.
>Does Google Pin Copyright Violations On the ASF?
Does the Slashdots mess the grammarings over the interwebs?
I think this might be a US/British English thing, the grammar looks fine to me.
Get free bitcoins: http://freebitco.in
This is the header:
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
* contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
* this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
* The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
Also, look at the path:
package org.apache.harmony.security.tests.support.acl
The law isn't supposed to cover what Google was doing. After all, what benefit to the useful arts is there for a copyright to be extended beyond the authors life that justifies the cost of infringing on the creator-given right to speech of the rest of humanity?
What's wrong with the grammar? I mean, it doesn't scan well (mostly because of the title caps) but it's correct: Does Google pin copyright violations on the ASF?
>on the copyright side of the lawsuit
What lawsuit? How about a complete summary? Maybe tell me what lawsuit we're talking about?
Assholes ...
Does Google not have someone double checking their code? They could have avoided this potentially damning evidence by simply having one developer review the source code( a good idea no matter how small your project is ). All you need are a couple of automated scripts to flag files with foreign copyright. After you find these rogue files, write around them.
In Florian's paper, he points these out as Sun PROPRIETARY / CONFIDENTIAL. However, it looks like several of the sources come from Sun's mmademo, linked here. In this rendition of the document, each source file's license is a permissive one by Sun (i.e., not proprietary / confidential).
The ones from microedition seem to be mentioned elsewhere under GPL.
Some sources seem to come from here, where some of the files (e.g., Control.java) have the proprietary markings, but these are interfaces. Control, for example, is an empty interface. Not sure if that affects anything.
I'm not qualified to make any sense out of this, but it seems like several of the sources Florian mentions are actually GPL'd sources with incorrect headers. There are a few trivial ones that (in the source I found) seem to be correctly marked proprietary. As much as I admire Florian's ability to grep, I think he's just found an error in some headers, not actual violations.
The grammar's fine. What it actually *means* is something else entirely.
... however it's entirely possible that Google has a copyright assignment agreement with the ASF. If this is the case, they may simply be putting an ASF copyright header at the top of Android source files, with the assumption that people at the ASF will pick up any that are actually useful and incorporate them into their codebases. This would mean that the ASF actually does own the subset of this code that Google has the right to assign ...
An AC posted a header. If accurate it seems to license not assign ownership:
"Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements."
Just because the code was allegedly re-licensed under the Apache license doesn't mean Apache had anything to do with it. That would be like claiming the FSF is responsible for all code released under the GPL. As already noted, the files in question were not part of the Harmony code base, so I don't understand how anyone could see this as Google "pinning copyright violations on ASF".
Sounds like someone definitely f**ked up though.
I hope their "Unladen Swallow" project succeeds, so they can port everything to Python and give Oracle the finger.
I don't get it. Searching the source code for words like "proprietary", "distribute", "licence", "sun" must have been the first step taken by anyone intrested in finding out more of the Oracle lawsuit. Not to mention Oracle's investigation, hundreds of tech-savvy people must have done it the same day as the story broke. How can this be a new finding? I mean.. he is the first person savvy enough to wield the arcane power of The Grep on ze code and post about it? Not probable. I dont get it.
I haven't seen any explanation of whether Google has attempted to get Dalvik included in the OIN Linux system, which would get them patent protection from Oracle, who are licensees.
Oh, I wasn't going to try to attribute logical meaning to that technically correct sentence.
Why don't Google just remove the GPL or ApacheL infringing app from their MarketPlace/AppStore and be done with it then?
Schmidt happens. How about spending some time on removing endless spam in search results instead of wasting time on this "hobby"?
How much longer is Google going to have an angelic reputation?
Do no evil my ass.
Why are they praised despite stuff like this and stuff like their net neutrality bullshit?
Suppose I grab a copy of some of Oracle's propriety licensed source code, and change the header to attribute the copyright to me and change the date to a prior date. How can Oracle conclusively prove that they didn't steal the code from me?
For that matter, who's to say that some of Oracle's source code wasn't lifted from some other OSS project with the headers changed?
The idea that simply placing "Copyright (c) 1995, mswhippingboy" in the header of a file seems like pretty flimsy evidence either way to me.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Does the Sun/Oracle code exist in the Google code base or not?
And no, I didn't look. Because that doesn't change the fact that your attack is trying to pose as an argument.
[This post has been removed.]
Last edited by cdrtaco Friday January 21.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The big deal is this:
From the beginning, some others believed that the Android developers had utilized a decompiler. I read about that theory on a couple of different websites, especially reddit.com. When I looked into this case again, I downloaded a Java decompiler named JAD. And when I decompiled PolicyNodeImpl.class from J2SE 5.0, the result was pretty much the same source code as Android's PolicyNodeImpl.java code (which Oracle presented in its Exhibit J). My "PolicyNodeImpl synopsis" document shows the similarities.
I then performed the same comparison for six other files in the adjacent "acl" subdirectory. The Android versions of those files are available on the Web (Android version 2.2 aka "Froyo", Android version 3.0 aka "Gingerbread"). My synopsis PDF files document the same problem: Android contains, under the Apache license, code that is essentially just decompiled code of Oracle/Sun software that was never licensed to Apache.
Interestingly, PolicyNodeImpl.java (the file used by Oracle in its Exhibit J) appears not to have been part of the most recent Android distributions, while the six other files I identified are part of the two most recent and presently most relevant distributions: Froyo (Android 2.2) and Gingerbread (Android 2.3). That makes those files even more important than the one Oracle presented.
The old story about one decompiled class was made not quite relevant by the fact that it was not part of the OS itself, but some supporting code that is easily removed. Now, though, it turns out that vendors have shipped decompiled proprietary Sun/Oracle code on numerous Android-based devices, courtesy of Google. That will not look good in the court at all.
Do no evil my @$$. Steve Jobs was right about them.
But that aside, while I think all of us know that Google is just a greedy corporate entity like all the others, what amazes is me is that they made a mistake so titanic, something that even a student wouldn't do.
Aren't they supposed to be the brightest and the smartest people of the world ? How could they think nobody would spot stolen code in open sources, free for everybody to read them ?
Dear Oracle,
As a long-time customer of both Oracle and Sun, as well as a professional Java developer and an Android user, I have a request to make of you.
Please stop being douchebags.
Sincerely,
Me
The extent to which a API header files are protectable is debatable.
Assuming this file was protect-able to some extent ...
If google removed all the comments and just left the variable names and method names It should at that point no longer be something
that was by itself protect-able with copyright because it doesn't contain any non-functional elements., They could then distribute that file.
The binary would be identical with the new source and old ...
You _can't copyright the name of methodX_ in order to stop others from being functionally compatible.
Since the protect-able elements if they existed look trivial and it looks like an innocent mistake. The courts are not likely to fuck this up.
"A close look at the actual files and accompanying documentation, however, suggest that it's not a simple case of copy and paste. The infringing files are found in a compressed archive in a third-party component supplied by SONiVOX, a member of Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA). SONiVOX, which was previously called Sonic, develops an Embedded Audio Synthesis (EAS) framework and accompanying Java API wrappers which it markets as audioINSIDE."
It's not clear how the zip file got included in the AOSP, but it's obvious that it wasn't intended to be there and isn't actually used by Android in any capacity. Android is using SONiVOX's EAS code, but doesn't use or need the MMAPI wrapper. This incident is very clearly not a case of Android stealing code from Sun or J2ME. It's a handful of test cases from an unrelated and publicly available Sun reference implementation that got uploaded by accident to AOSP in a zip archive supplied by a third party. It's a tacky mistake, but it's hardly serious or damaging. At worst, it warrants a takedown notice. It's certainly not a smoking gun as one might assume when viewing the code out of context.
Ed Burnette dug down and found the code to be unused unit-tests and unused driver code, not shipped with android.
See Oops: No copied Java code or weapons of mass destruction found in Android
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Google copycatting will cost them Googlebucks.
Tom Callaway has done tremendous work cleaning up the Chromium codebase and one of the things he found is that Google just grabs stuff without thinking.
They say things like they need to fork, they can't use existing versions, they need to copy code wholesale into their codebase, etc. He's proven them wrong on those counts by systematically replacing all their half-baked crap with system libraries. They don't seem to regard licenses very highly either.
The same think happened with the Android kernel. That's why it was dropped from mainline Linux, it was largely crap. They're now doing it right.
BUT ... the question for Google is whether waiting a couple years to do it all right would have been better. No - they've made tremendous headway into the handheld computer market with Android over the past couple years. I bet they did break some rules. I also bet any awarded damages will be far less than the amount they stand to make as the handheld market leader.
In this case, being sneaky pays.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Florian doesn't seem to consider the possibility that when Google acquired the files, they didn't have the "CONFIDENTIAL" notice on them. If the files were obtained as part of a larger demo or test suite released with an encompassing less-restrictive license, as appears to be the case with at least some of the files mentioned, then maybe someone other than Google (even possibly a Sun employee) scrubbed the notices accordingly. The tone of the article doesn't give Google much benefit of the doubt that these might be honest mistakes, and perfectly legal usages.
Florian states: "Even if one claimed that Oracle/Sun later made the file available under the GPL (for which I haven't found any conclusive evidence), that wouldn't allow such a license change either."
No conclusive evidence? I guess he never checked out OpenJDK.
And another thing, Android phones don't use any of the classes starting with the package "sun".
if there's guilt, it seems that the files involved are essentially insignificant in the context of android. does that factor into damages? is guilt here all or nothing? is stealing 100 lines of stolen source code the same as 1 million? common sense would say no but of course the laws here aren't common sense.
They were republishing abandoned books. Any author who could not be found (e.g. the copyright notice did not point to the copyright owner or there was no response) were included, but all that was needed was to say "I'm the author, please remove it" and it was.
Any dead author would find that difficult.
So, no they weren't republishing books from live authors in the way you want to infer: that that was all they were doing.
If the copyright owner doesn't WANT to make any money any more from a work, what's lost when someone else makes a copy?
Nothing that copyright is supposed to protect (i.e the only reason for abandoning works making any damage to the author is that they want to hide older works so that they are no longer competition for newer works, which isn't what copyright is for).
Well I'm British and living in the US. I still had to read it three times to work out which was the verb and which was the noun.
What service is 'Google Pin' anyway?
Evil people are out to get you.