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Does Google Pin Copyright Violations On the ASF?

Posted by Soulskill on from the plot-thickens dept.

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."

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. I am confused. by Even+on+Slashdot+FOE · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:I am confused. by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Except that as far as I've seen (troll blog post notwithstanding) Google didn't try to blame anything on anyone -- they used the Apache license. ASF independently clarified saying that the choice of Apache license does not mean that it was a part of the ASF-owned Harmony project.

      From the referenced ASF blog:

      Recent reports on various blogs have attributed to the ASF a number of the source files identified by Oracle as ones that they believe infringe on their copyrights. The code in question has an header that mentions Apache, and perhaps that is the source of the confusion. The code itself is using a license that is named after our foundation, is in fact the license that we ourselves use. Many others use it too, as the license was explicitly designed to allow such uses. Even though the code in question has an Apache license, it is not part of Harmony. PolicyNodeImpl.java is simply not a Harmony class.

      That's all. No "blaming" involved on Google's part. No "disowning" on ASF's part. Just one annoying blogger trying for ad impressions.

  2. Re:Really? by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Google used the Apache Software License, which is not the same as attributing the code to the Apache Foundation.

    Google had originally said that the code came from Apache Harmony (which Android Java libraries are derived from), which is attributing the code to ASF.