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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?
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.
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?
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.
"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
Not so helpful after all, I'm sorry to say.