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Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Dr. Dobb's looks into the consequences of a dangerous idea from Oracle during their legal battle with Google: 'that Google had violated Oracle's Java copyrights by reimplementing Java APIs in Android.' The issue is very much unsettled in the courts, but the judge in this case instructed the jury to assume the APIs were copyrightable. 'In a nutshell, if the jury sides with Oracle that the copyrights in the headers of every file of the Java source base apply specifically to the syntax of the APIs, then Oracle can extract payment and penalties from Google for having implemented those APIs without Oracle's blessing (or, in more specific terms, without a license). Should this come to pass, numerous products will suddenly find themselves on an uncertain legal standing in which the previously benign but now newly empowered copyright holders might assert punitive copyright claims. Chief among these would be any re-implementation of an existing language. So, Jython, IronPython, and PyPy for Python; JRuby, IronRuby, and Rubinius for Ruby; Mono for C# and VB; possibly C++ for C, GCC for C and C++ and Objective-C; and so forth. And of course, all the various browsers that use JavaScript might owe royalties to the acquirers of Netscape's intellectual property.'"
We realize that we can all use Perl free of charge.
And with that, the internet fell, and mankind returned to the stone age.
I am John Hurt.
M.A.D. strategies don't work too well when one side is perfectly fine with destruction.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Would this also possibly imply that a programmer needs to get a license to code in a specific language or to utilize a specific API? What is stopping Oracle from adding that to the JDK terms of use?
Wouldn't that mean that SQL is also copyright, completely destroying Oracle's business?
copyrighting code at all is a slippery slope that leads to nothing but hair-splitting. Even if the judge throws that particular claim out, then what? It's legal to copy the top-level calls of someone's API, but illegal to make underlying code that too closely resembles the original? It seems like any line that gets drawn here is going to be stupid and arbitrary, of the form "you are legally allowed to copy/re-implement a certain percentage of a copyrighted work, but no more than that percentage!"
Then you have a developer community whose primary incentive is to reinvent the wheel, not to develop new innovations on already-proven technology.
Oh wait, was this a "best use of exaggeration" contest?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The Judge is wrong.
Past jurisprudence (and a lot of it, mind...) has held that things that are purely functional are **NOT** Copyrightable.
This includes:
Build Scripts in general.
Header Files.
It's appealable and is VERY likely to be overturned on appeal.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The article claims Mono could be sued for copyright infringements, but actually Microsoft's public statements would count against any legal actions they could attempt against Miguel De Icaza.
If I had any concerns about .NET beyond the fact that Mono is pretty crappy and every Mono app ever written feels like it's being hosted under Wine, I'd be upset about this. But actually... from what I hear, C Sharp is a very nice programming language...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What is an API? It's basically an agreement about the ordering and identification of arguments either in memory or in series of network messages. If the judge actually finds that the API itself is copyrightable, then any computer program that writes to a standard interface is completely screwed. Write your own SMTP client? Sorry, that interface is copyright. Your own web server? Ditto.
APIs are the most functional part of computer programming -- they tell you 'this is how you communicate between parts A and B.' Yet, copyright is intended to only protect expression, not 'how' you do anything -- that's the realm of patent law. And while Oracle has patent claims mixed in here, Oracle isn't claiming a patent on the Java API.
I'm getting a distinct sense lately that we may be coming to the end of the era of innovation and the beginning of an era where it's essentially impossible to invent anything or innovate in any way unless you have a powerful corporate sponsor backing you. Unless you have a sponsor with a big patent collection of their own and deep pockets, how can the little guy possibly hope to defend himself against a bevy of lawsuits that cover even the most trivial or obvious of ideas these days?
Oracle here isn't even saying that their code was stolen, they're suing a company for writing their own code that implements the same *SYNTAX* as theirs.
Think of it as an age where the Wright brothers have just pulled their plane to a stop only to be greeted by an army of process servers serving them with dozens of expensive patent lawsuits on the shape of the prop, the design of the stick, even the IDEA of a "craft that flies."
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This sounds an awful lot like the arguments that AT&T brought forth against Berkeley regarding the Unix System V vs. BSD arguments back in the early '80s.
AT&T rightfully lost those arguments, and BSD moved forward.
If Oracle succeeds with this, you can expect whoever holds the AT&T copyright nowadays to come after Linux and other Unix-like systems again, despite them just following what are now documented standards accepted by the industry.
Oracle's arguments should be rejected for the same reasons as AT&T's.
I was under the impression that Google had used the Java GPL source to compile their core jars. I later had it clarified that such is not the case; they used the Apache source.
A decision in favour of Oracle would throw the entire computing industry overboard and cause no end of harm to the industry.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
What about all the sockets implementations, including Windows, that use the Berkeley sockets API? How about every implementation of the standard C library, which uses the API from the original Unix C library?
Or how about PCs themselves? IBM holds the copyrights to the original PC BIOS API. And not a single machine today uses a BIOS that was written with a license from IBM to reimplement the BIOS API. That was the whole point of the Phoenix and other compatible BIOSes. If the old holding in the case between IBM and Compaq/Phoenix is invalidated, can IBM enjoin the production of every PC system out there (including x86-based servers) and demand the destruction of all infringing copies (ie. every single PC-compatible system including x86-based servers) as allowed under USC Title 17 Section 503?
These days it seems that judges are at best arbiters of legal technicality. Their abject ignorance of so many everyday technical, scientific, and artistic issues is becoming a significant threat to our economy and our society.
I think the issue is more that we should despise US copyright law.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Indeed. If they rule in favor of Oracle here, I have a strong feeling that recursive lawsuits (Java -> C++ -> C -> ASM) will eventually engulf the entire industry. What it will do to businesses is nothing compared to what it will do to universities. Imagine an assignment to implement an API, only to find out its violating someone's copyright. And all the SE / CS & friends people know that that's about 50% of what you do when studying for your major.
The good news is that programmers will suddenly be worth that much more (as no one will want the liability of being one); the bad news is that even horrible programmers will suddenly cost a few million to employ, and require staff to ensure no ones agreements were being violated anywhere.
I am John Hurt.
Whether APIs are protectable is a (not fully resolved) question of the law, and hence the judge's prerogative to decide. Most of us groklavians believe the judge is simply making sure there will be no retrial. If the jury says no copyright violation even under the assumption you can copyright APIs, then he doesn't have to make a decision about whether APIs may be protected by copyright. Surely whatever decision he makes will be appealed, so the jury might be able to make that portion of the case go away.
The judge told the jury to assume that APIs were copyrightable for purposes of their deliberation, for one reason, and one reason only.
The judge determined that whether APIs are copyrightable or not is a question of *law* not *fact*, and therefore was an issue properly decided by the judge. If the judge deliberates and determines that APIs are *not* copyrightable, then it doesn't matter what decision the jury makes. If he decides they *are*, then the jury's verdict will actually come into play.
Either (or both) decisions on the matter are open to appeal if Google (or Sun) disagrees with the decision(s) in question.
If APIs are copyrightable, could other companies use that against Oracle?
The summary is wrong. The judge has not said that APIs are eligible for copyright; his ruling on that will come later. He merely asked the jury to determine whether Google copied the Java APIs, regardless of whether it was legal or not.
This makes sense from a procedural point of view. In the court system, juries determine matters of fact and judges determine matters of law. The judge knows that this case will be appealed regardless of how he rules, so he is playing it safe and making sure that the jury determines any matters of fact that may come to play during the appeals process to avoid a second jury trial later.
What, you mean your CV doesn't list 1,500 years experience with J2EE?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
To say a programming language is copyrightable is, to me, the very same as saying a spoken language is copyrightable. Imagine if you were to be exacted a fee for every english word you speak. Wouldn't that be ridiculous? Now, I can see a greedy company tolerably being able to require licensing for their specific interpreter or compiler (though this idea seems a bit ridiculous to me personally), but it makes no sense that the syntax should be allowed to be under such requirements. If this were allowed to pass through the legal system and continue on the same course, it could perhaps lend to the possibility of a day in the future where the very way you word your sentence could fall under copyright, and thus incur legal penalties or fees.
http://faazshift.blogspot.com/
Aaaaaaah! All that time spent learning Commodore Basic may yet pay off!
The "reimplementing" of the API is not the subject here. The use of the same API is. Google does claim they performed a clean room reimplementation. Oracle tried to say Google stole their code, but after building custom software to look for copied code they found a single 9 line function that they claimed was copied out of 15 million lines of code. Having nowhere to go with the code copying claim they came up with the 'But you're using my API!' nonsense. Many APIs have been reimplemented all over the place, win32 alone has been a few times.. this has always been assumed to be okay.
Copyright and patents are regulated monopolies. Monopoly is bad for business. Cancel the monopoly and reinvigorate business.
Do it in stages. Set expiry of patents and copyright to lesser of (say) 10 years or half of current unexpired period. And any new patent or copyright is for 8 years, and reduce that period by six months each successive year until copyrights and patents have disappeared.
Google (Schmidt, personally) has testified in court that Google did a clean-room implementation of Java.
So far, Oracle's argument that Google did not do a clean-room implementation amounts to, "Uh uh! No they didn't!". Also, to nitpik, you can't "lift code" from an API.
They try not to make new precedent, if they don't have to for the most part. They'll rule on something more narrowly, when possible.
Be able to, sure... But they are more wise than that. Doing something asinine like that would kill them.
Microsoft isn't headed by a megalomaniac like Ellison who is unable to see that other companies are getting REALLY paranoid about further use of Java. (We've discussed dumping it where I work.) And Oracle DB as well.
Very strange to see the day when Microsoft is the 'nice guy'!
Look and feel of an application is not copyrightable. Microsoft fought apple over this a long time ago and won. Apple had claimed Windows infringed the look and feel of Mac OS. That precedent is one really good thing MS has done for the world.
You're taking a fairly clear case, such as Google's use of Java APIs (which are being used by Google as if they were completely free and under public domain, even though a really big chunk of Oracle's business is in tight integration of Oracle database products with Java, which is technically their property as it was Sun's), and trying to extend it to cases that are really, really unclear. The owners of C suing C++? What are you talking about? Someone...maybe one of the various Unix variation's owners...who owns some of the algorithms behind the stdio apis suing Bjarne Stroustrop? Random companies? And wouldn't they get sued themselves for deriving from earlier works if that were true? That's highly unclear. Just like it is with a lot of those other technologies you rattled off, many that are at least partially IN the public domain and can be derived from as is their nature as object oriented languages.
In a nutshell, I know how many of you are Android fanboys and I understand that there will be some who whine about Oracle suing Google over their misuse of their technology, but basically anyone even slightly familiar with Android's Java implementation knows that it's not quite "real" Java. And Microsoft got their pants sued off for doing basically the same thing (and people didn't complain so much about the end of programming as we knew it because it was Microsoft), so there is certainly a precedent for this lawsuit. Google just needs to remove all that Java from Android and replace it with their own framework. Other mobile operating systems have done that already. Everyone who knew anything knew this was going to happen, but Android got too big, too fast, and by doing so they would break a huge number of third party apps (as in, probably all of them) and anger a lot of vendors who've been selling systems with Android on them. That's the main reason why Google would settle this case and pay up if it keeps going. However, it's awful doubtful to me that the Netscape people will have a solid case to sue everyone who uses javascript, and that Bjarne Stroustroup will get sued for C++ by some Unix property holder. Any judge would throw that out because there's no clear cut case there with companies sitting on those properties that they are being negatively impacted by the "misuse" of one of their properties (and that's even if their patent holds up under review anymore).
Call me silly, but I don't think Novell would have spent the last half of the previous decade indemnifying Linux users and defending it's UNIX copyrights if it intended in turning around and suing them for the exact same thing SCO was trying to do.
It is a zero sum game at this point. If this actually becomes precedent, Oracle would get obliterated, along with everybody else. Plenty of languages have come before Java and you better believe there is some major api overlap. I cannot wait to watch the world burn when Oracle is forced to pay a 50 million dollar license for the use of the copyrighted ToString() function.
is the most backward, selfish and anti-progress idea ever. To think that the only time anyone would solve a problem would be if they had an enormous financial reward coming their way. What about the benefits of solving the problem itself? Is that not enough anymore?
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Since the jury will have ruled on the premise that the APIs are protected by copyright, and since whatever the judge rules on the legal question is bound to appealed by one side or the other, the question of fact will have been resolved by the jury if it turns out to be relevant either based on the trial judges decision or based on an appellate decision.
Because the trial jury will have decided the issue, the likelihood of further proceedings being necessary after appeal will be reduced.
One might read this as an indication that the judge is going to rule against APIs being protected, since nothing would be saved by this if he was going to rule in favor of them being protected. But if he issued that ruling before the questions were put to the jury, then the question couldn't be included in the jury instruction, since it would no longer be a relevant question of fact.
So in other words, a programmer would be paid to sit on his hands while ten lawyers squabble about what the programmer can legally program.
We live in a world where everyone wants to assign monetary value to things.
In such a world, the design of an API is serious work. We've all used good APIs and bad APIs. It is a very skillful operation.
Not saying if this is the ideal world or not... just that it is the world in which we live in. We live in a world of professions (lawyers, doctors, accountants...) where they protect their trade and professional quality.
One possible solution is if APIs want this protection, then they should have to explicitly declare it. The 'market' will to a large extent respond appropriately. Companies that declare their APIs copyrighted will be handicapped. There will be fewer compatible tools. Fewer developers will train themselves in the API...
There are already well-established anti-trust and anti-monopoly regulations to protect against abuse in such cases. They must charge 'reasonable' fees...
We've been through such cases before... for example with rail road operators.
There are three different questions that have to be resolved in Oracle's favor for a verdict in Oracle's favor on this point:
1. (legal) Are the APIs subject to copyright protection,
2. (factual) Did Google infringe the exclusive rights of Oracle as copyright holder of the APIs,
3. (factual) Was Google's infringement outside the scope of the exception carved out of the exclusive rights under fair use.
Each logically only requires a response if the preceding question is answered in the affirmative. #2 is presented to the jury as a question they must answer as if #1 were answered in the affirmative, though the court has not ruled on it; #3 is presented to the jury as a question they must answer if and only if they answer yes to #2.
A ruling in Oracle's favor on the legal issue (#1) would not obviously not mean fair use was not available as a defense. Nor, obviously, would a finding of fact in Oracle's favor on #2.
But even a verdict in Oracle's favor (meaning that all three issues were resolved in Oracle's favor) wouldn't mean that fair use wasn't available, it would just mean that the jury in this particular case didn't find Google's particular use of Oracle's copyright-protected APIs was fair use. Fact findings are not, however, precedential or binding on future triers of fact, only legal rulings are. (And the only legal ruling related to the availability of fair use in this case is that, at a minimum, it is an available defense, because if it wasn't, question #3 wouldn't be put to the jury at all, or would be put to the jury with the same restrictions as #2 in that it was waiting on a legal ruling on the applicability of the defense.)
This is serious, guys.
It's really not, for precisely the reasons you gave.
If this case were to go in Oracle's favour and if it were then allowed to set a precedent, the US software industry would be seriously damaged by legal infighting for a years to come. Even if a few large businesses on the scale of Google and Oracle could survive, in the same way that they play the patent pooling game to neutralise that threat from other big business while still screwing small businesses, innovation would die almost overnight and the next big software businesses would all be based outside the US. As the rest of the world looked on, bemused by the litigious culture of US business finally imploding, the total US economy would take a noticeable hit, Silicon Valley would become a historical footnote as investors fled to tech hubs in other jurisdictions, etc.
And so, if this were allowed to stand, it would suck for Google for about ten minutes, and then lobbyists backed by more money than has been printed in the history of humanity would descend on Washington and buy legislation to trump the court case and fix the problem.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
But Microsoft would need to pay back royalties to Dartmouth University for implementing BASIC without a license. Or perhaps to Harvard University as MS BASIC was originally a class assignment given to Bill Gates by his professor for the few terms he actually attended classes before deciding to drop out and make some real money.
Even money would be to Dartmouth though, as they came up with BASIC in the first place.
Not in the world of the World Trade Organization!!
By international treaty and law, all copyrights are honored worldwide. Therefore, what is copyrighted in the U.S. is also copyrighted in Europe immediately, and vice versa (and Asia, too, technically all the GATT countries, which is pretty much everybody worth conducting business with).
So, unless you want to undo almost a century of globalization, this will affect legal software worldwide, unless and until copyright laws can be amended to more sane terms.
Regardless, this has "rush to the Supreme Court" smeared all over it.
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
They have a hilarious anti-Linux rant where they claim Linux is unsafe for critical applications (like airplanes), Windows is more secure and safer (despite the fact that Windows malware on a system for computing weight and balance was responsible for a plane crash), and that Linux makes it easier for foreign spies, saboteurs and terrorists to attack us.
They even work 9/11 into their argument! OMG!
http://www.ghs.com/linux/security.html
http://www.ghs.com/linux/threat.html
"The 9/11 terrorist organizers had creativity, patience, and a desire to kill as many people as possible. The terroristsâ(TM) success and their continued ability to evade capture provides an example and encouragement to others. We must not turn our national defense over to Linux or any other operating system that is vulnerable to easy attack and subversion at all times. The 9/11 terrorist organizers, and all those whom they have inspired, are still out there, and they are still creative and patient. And if we make our national defense easy to attack, they will kill a lot more people. If Linux is deployed in critical defense systems, the result will be catastrophic."
WOW!
Sounds like a conspiracy rant, but it is a corporate website pushing their own OS!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!