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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)."
Just don't expect anyone to take interest in your language if you copyright it.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
If they were copyrighted, wouldn't the assembly and machine language folks get the last laugh? I mean, copyright lasts nearly forever now in the United States and the first guy who thought up what to call registers or how to represent them in a language or what shift left should look like or even the people who came up with RISC, CISC, etc would be laughing all the way to the bank ... right? I mean, even though it might just be a handful of instructions that interact with hardware, wouldn't this position make it just as copyrighted as the higher level languages which, in the end, depend on this stuff to interact with the hardware?
My work here is dung.
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.
Since Java borrows a lot of syntax from from C/C++ wouldn't that make it a derivative work ;)
Oracle doesn't care about that stuff. They will say just about anything so that Larry Ellison can buy another yacht.
Uhhh well, they should. I mean Oracle's PL/SQL is an extension of SQL which, would be copyrighted by someone from the long long ago. And if that person wanted to, they could basically say "Yeah, you know that language that your bread and butter runs on? It's infringing on my copyrights so you owe me ... gosh I don't know ... a hundred billion trillion dollars?"
...
And, like every other language, PL/SQL has to be turned into machine language at some point
My work here is dung.
Oracle, who thinks it can be, has used J.R.R. Tolkein's Elvish language as an example of a language that can be copyrighted.
Sure, but I wasn't aware that was a *programming* language.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm totally baffled by this and would like an explanation of how a language could possibly be copyrighted. Is Tolkein's Elvish language copyrighted, and if so, what does that mean? I can understand specific phrases from his books being copyrighted, but if I translated this post into Elvish, does Tolkein's estate suddenly own the copyright to this post? Or what?
Sorry, but the idea of owning the copyright to a language seems silly. I might understand patenting a use of a language or patenting a method of translation, but the language itself? Doesn't copyright need to apply to a specific expression? Like... I can copyright the image of a painting, but I can't copyright paint.
I suppose lawyers have an ethical duty to argue every point that reasonably could help their client, but this is silly. I really like the comments in a couple of the footnotes in Google's response:
Similarly, fictional languages such as Na’vi and Dothraki cannot be copyrighted. While the film Avatar and the television series Game of Thrones are copyrightable (including the portions in the fictional Na’vi and Dothraki languages), and while, for example, a dictionary or grammar textbook for either language would be copyrightable, the languages themselves are not. Oracle asks why copyright should not protect such languages, see Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9; the answer is that Section 102(b) says that they are not protected. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that allowing copyright owners to control who can express themselves in these languages would further the aims of copyright law.
Umm, duh. Do they really want to argue that, say, stating "Your mother is ugly" or some other random sentence in, say, Dothraki is a public performance of a copyrighted work? That's what it would have to be if the language itself were copyrightable.
Even clearer, though:
Oracle also argues that a computer language can be “original, text-based, and capable of fixation,” and thus that it must be copyrightable. See Oracle 4/5/12 Br. [Dkt. 859] at 9. First, Section 102(b) bars copyright protection for “original works of authorship” that fall within its enumerated classes of exclusion. See 17 U.S.C. 102(b). Thus, the fact that a system is original, text-based and fixed does not mean that Section 102(b) does not apply. Second, a language cannot be fixed. Certainly, a description of a language (e.g., a specification) can be fixed. A computer program written using the language (e.g., the Gmail application on Android phones) or an implementation of a language (e.g., a compiler or interpreter) can be fixed. But none of those things is “the language,” any more than a dictionary “is” English, Das Boot “is” German, or a C compiler “is” the C programming language. See Baker, 101 U.S. at 102 (“But' there is a clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which it is intended to illustrate. The mere statement of the proposition is so evident, that it requires hardly any argument to support it.”); cf. René Magritte, La trahison des images.
Exactly. How can you write down a "language"? You can describe it. You can list the allowable words and explain how they can and cannot be put together, but such a description isn't a language. You can use it. You can create prose, poetry, or, computer programs with it, expressing and fixing your own ideas in the constructs provided by the language, but an expression in a language isn't the language.
A language is about as pure an abstract idea as I can imagine, and ideas are not copyrightable, only expressions.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but have nothing to do with any of this Java folderol, other than using the language occasionally. I'm a programmer but not a language expert and would not be qualified to offer expert testimony on this topic, even if I were asked to, which I haven't been. Other than the quotes, the above is my own opinions, nothing more. In this case it appears that they align closely with Google's officially-stated opinions, however!)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And in one fel swoop, this case has gone from simple money grabbing to downright surreal. To decide whether a language itself can be copyright-able is going to be incredibly significant, regardless of which way the final decision goes, and I'm believe it was unwise for Oracle to even raise this issue.
If a programming language cannot be copyrighted, then their whole argument goes down the tubes and they can potentially lose a lot more than just this lawsuit. They could conceivably lose control of java.
If a programming language CAN be copyrighted, I expect to see a flurry of lawsuits as different language authors start suing one another for "stealing" parts of "their" language. The vast majority, if not all, of java syntax is directly lifted from other languages. There is absolutely nothing unique about Java's grammar.
I am going to be very interested now in the outcome of this case.
But the specification is not the language. The specification is a description of the language, but that's not the same as the language itself. Anybody else is free to write their own specification that's functionally equivalent but described differently.
Of course, I'd argue that it's unreasonable and unethical to charge for access to an official standard (in the same way it would be unethical to charge for access to the text of a law), but that's a different discussion.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz