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Oracle and Google Spar Over Whether Programming Languages Can Be Copyrighted
pcritter writes "With the Oracle v. Google trial date set for next Monday, the Judge has asked Google and Oracle to take a position on whether a programming language is copyrightable. This presumably relates to whether Google violated copyright by using a variant of the Java language and its APIs in the Android framework. Oracle, who thinks it can be, has used J.R.R. Tolkein's Elvish language as an examples (PDF) of a language that can be copyrighted. Google disagrees (PDF)."
Except that the title of this article clearly says "copyright" and the 20 year limit is what patents are in the states (although extensions and whatnot make that mean jack anyway). Enjoy your "one generation" graph.
My work here is dung.
Thing is, while some third-party books do claim to "Teach ... Java for Android", as far as I know Google has never claimed that Dalvik is Java. Whereas for a typical embrace and extend, be it Kerberos or Java, Microsoft did claim that their extended fork was still Java, and marketed it as such. The Microsoft lawsuit was really about the use of the Java trademark (hence why Microsoft renamed their product J++), and not a copyright infringement case. So that case doesn't really apply as precedent here and it would seem that Oracle is overreaching.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
In the US only purely creative work can be copyrighted. Basically you can only copyright something if it has no practical application. This means that literature movies and music can be copyrighted but clothing, recipes and industrial design cannot. A fictional language (such as Klingon) could be argued to fall under the realm of copyright because it is not really practical. Google has a fairly strong case that a programming language is not copyrightable. The libraries written using that programming language in both compiled and uncompiled form would fall under copyright though.
Didn't Sun already win this case against Microsoft?
AFAIK they won a trademark case, not a copyright case: Microsoft could not fork their own bastardization of Java and still call it Java.
Orc isn't a Tolkien invention any more than the term "elf". Tolkien used these terms in a slightly different way and redefined fantasy using them, but he didn't invent either. Orc, in case you were wondering, is derived from the Latin word "kill" or "killer". Hence the marine mammal "orca" or "killer whale".
No, it's a specific way of licensing your creation.
Tolkein developed a fairly in-depth grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation guide, and even name patterns for Elves. He wasn't *just* making up words, he was creating a language.
- 17 USC S 102
You can copyright a program expressed in a language, a book describing the language, a compiler or interpreter which implements the language, but not the language itself. Although, if Oracle can get a ruling that a language is copyrightable, then IBM may want to exert a copyright over SQL.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No, copyright is there with or without licensing. Copyright means that nobody can use it (for certain definitions of "use") without your permission. Licensing is giving that permission, usually with certain conditions attached. The two concepts are related in that there would be far less need for licensing without copyright, but nonetheless are very distinct.
The language is defined by (a) rules to decide whether a given source is a valid program, and (b) rules to define the behaviour of any valid program.
For example, I could define a language by stating that a text is a valid program if it doesn't contain any 'e', and the behaviour of the program is to print the number of lines of the text.
That's not a very useful language, but a language. Note however that the sentence above is not the language, but a description of the language. A valid program in the language would be
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And who says Tolkein's Elvish is copyrighted anyway? His description of it could be copyrighted, sure, but that's not the same as copyrighting the language itself. Don't tell me some dumbass judge granted an injunction on other people writing elvish grammar books
Tolkien Estate says it's copyrighted. And, yes, they have been going around and suing people publishing linguistic works on Sindarin and such based on that interpretation. It's pretty well known in the community that deals with those things.
That said, I don't think it ever came to a court injunction. Generally speaking, the enthusiasts don't have the time, the money and the inclination to go to court over such things, so they just back off when threatened with a C&D.