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Oracle Vs. Google and the Right To Use APIs
jfruh writes "Even as an EU court rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, tech observers are waiting for the Oracle v. Google trial jury to rule on the same question under U.S. law. Blogger Brian Proffitt spoke with Groklaw's Pamela Jones on the issue, and her take is that a victory for Oracle would be bad news for developers. Essentially, Oracle is claiming that, while an individual API might not be copyrightable, the collection of APIs needed to use a language is. Such a decision would, among other things, make Java's open source nature essentially meaningless, and would have lots of implications for any programming language you can name."
What really reeks me is Google's double standards on these issues. Yes, APIs should not be copyrightable. But here we have a company that is trying to copyright search results listings. Listings that are built from other people's content!
I understand Google's need to protect their business, but the view they're trying to make of themselves is cowardly. Google wants everyone to look upon them as some kind of white knights and better-than-you company. Yet they do exactly the same thing when it's their business on the table.
It's not only some vague Terms of Service or other mainly uncontrolled and unforceable terms either. Google will ban you from accessing their service the instant their algorithm detects it's not an actual human being making searches and viewing their ads. Even if you behave nicely with your scripts and rate-limit them not to hit Google's servers badly. On the other hand, Google has no problem hitting your servers and causing more than $1000 fees for the owner for nothing.
Before Google starts attacking everyone else about these issues, maybe they should rethink their position. Otherwise it's just bullshit. And bad bullshit too, because they are trying to hide the fact.
Intel licensed the x86 instruction set to AMD.
If an instruction set is licensable, then an API can be too...although it's unclear from what I've read if the licensing covered the instruction set itself or the right to manufacture something compatible with that instruction set. Either way, that should cover the API.
the rest of us who know what we're talking about have to sit around and wait for outsider judges and juries to decide the context of things far outside their grasp. it takes years for an engineer to become competent in these technologies, and now we have bus drivers and secretaries deciding what applies to us and our trade in the span of mere weeks. can we get specialized jury selection for cases involving specialized knowledge?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
... I move to the EU.
At least there is still one region in the world where the hairless monkeys haven't gone completely insane.
He has asked the parties to brief him in light of the EU decision.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is just another example of companies that are going the way of the dinosaur trying to litigate instead of innovate. Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This idea seems rather broken. Juries are supposed to decide matters of fact and courts are supposed to decide matters of law. Whether an API is copyrightable is purely a matter of law, not fact. What the hell's going on here? This decision is the judge's responsibility.
Oracle has never claimed that Google violated its patents (probably because it doesn't hold patents protecting the Java API).
The case was in fact about patents before it became clear that Google was very likely to prevail on Oracle's patent infringement allegations. At that point, Oracle decided to add a copyright infringement claim. The suit over U.S. Patents 5966702, 6910205, and RE38104 is still pending and will be resolved after the copyright suit concludes.
The question submitted to the jury was one of fact: "Let's pretend that the API is copyrightable. Was it copied?" After the answer comes back, the judge will decide the question of law as to whether it was copyrightable in the first place.
It's not that in the EU that APIs can't be copyrighted, it's that APIs can be clean-room reimplemented. Whether or not they can be copyrighted is another story all together.
Google didn't do a clean room implementation of Java with Dalvik.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Wouldn't Oracle be guilty of this, as well, to some extent? Oracle couldn't possibly be using a 100% "clean" environment for their product or development systems. If they use C and standard libraries, they're using, in effect, copyright-able APIs.
If API's can be restricted like this, it would go far beyond simple languages. Think about the concept of what an API actually is..
Even something as apparently benign as replacement parts for your washer could be restricted and eliminate cheaper 3rd party parts. Even if its not electronic in nature, just claim that nothing can be compatible enough to hook up to your 'widget connector version b'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ColdFusion was about the only language (in my experience - sure there's others) that you needed to pay for the runtime for your code (in a production environment; development version was free; The "Express" version went away around 2001 or so). Then along come Railo and Open BlueDragon, and there were open source alternatives. The "language" itself is pretty basic (most developers get by using just 5 tags), but the power of it comes when you use the various feature tags that are more akin to APIs (cfchart, cfpdf, cfsearch, etc). Railo and OpenBD of course implement all these tags. Whereas Oracle doesn't "sell" Java, Adobe sells ColdFusion - if Oracle wins, Adobe has 100% motivation to eliminate their competition. (Should also point out that OpenBD's lineage comes from New Atlanta, which sells commercial version of Blue Dragon - MySpace was built on this.)
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
It's not the what that should be eligible for copy-right protection, it's the how. APIs are the what. The implementation is the how.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Didn't slashdot just post this exact article yesterday?
moox. for a new generation.
So writing a piece of code that basically generates "Hello World" requires licensing?
Sadly, I absolutely do not trust the US to make the correct decision in this case. IP law in America needs to be nuked from orbit and rebuilt from scratch, and the prevailing attitude there right now doesn't seem to be amenable to something like that.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It is pretty sad when lawyers confuse trademark, patent, and copyright and an ignorant jury and public. Now through judicial activism they are doing the same by making any of them equal. It is easier to trademark than to patent but in essence the copyright has patent powers that list 170 fuck years or something with no patent fees!
Terrible and scary.
http://saveie6.com/
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Judge Alsup is pleading the Seventh: "no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." This way, the jury's verdict on the facts is on the books no matter what questions of law the Court of Appeals remands back to Alsup, and there's no need for an expensive retrial.
Does anyone else feel like we have had too many Oracle vs Google stories lately? Now it's not news - it's the opinion of Groklaw's Pamela as interviewed by a blogger. And - surprise - they think that victory of Oracle would be bad news for developers. "Stuff that matters" - yes. But it's not "news for geeks", with emphasis on the "news".
IANAL but I wonder if an API being copyrightable starting now, what happens to all those 3rd party developments that "use" the API? Does that mean a corporation who had/will have some Java application built for them is now liable?
And Dennis Ritchie's estate would like to talk to them about all the royalties they need to cough up for using the c standard library.
And Bjarne Stroustrup and Bell Labs want to talk to them about royalties for using classes, and the whole dot syntax, and the whole of Java being just a poor man's c++.
There is absolutely no way that Oracle is going to win this one - even they know that the immediate consequences would be disasterous for them, as the whole world drops Java for anything else.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
The BIOS used in Windows-compatible PCs is a set of APIs, and it has been reverse-engineered by essentially every PC clone maker. Without permission. Aren't Windows-compatible computer makers in danger of being sued by Levono if API sets can be copyrighted?
It seems that if Oracle successfully argues this point, everybody that provides Oracle with a library is going to demand a license fee. Imagine if Brian Kernighan decided that the C standard library ought to be generating more (well, some) income...
The PC BIOS is a set of APIs that has been reverse-engineered by various PC clone makers without permission. If API sets can be copyrighted, won't Levono be able to sue all of the various makers of Windows-compatible PCs?
Honest question (IANAL): if APIs can't be copyrighted, then does that mean glibc or the Linux kernel can't be protected under the GPL?
I think that something is only an API if we call it an API. However, I think once an entity labels something as an API, that should be the same as saying, "this subset of our source code is freely implementable and modifiable by anybody." It should be the same as saying, "we as a company are opting out of claiming this part of our source code is our IP."
How about this for an API:
size_t count_chickens(const egg_vector_t& eggs);
Ok, got a copyright on that. Don't even *think* about implementing that without licensing from me.
Copyright and (software) patents both: it keeps going on and on and on from bad to worse to WTF. When is the shit finally hitting the fan, and things blow up in the rightsholders' faces: a sudden move back to reason?
When I search Google for "Oracle", I'm quite surprised to find the first hit is not for the goatse.cx guy. Perhaps they're waiting to do that until after the case is over?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Think about that for a moment. The x86 instruction set used in your computer today is an api. If copyright of an API is upheld, AMD disappears. Every ISA ever is now copyrighted. Competition is dead in a single fell swoop.
The purpose of an API is to allow "your" code to interoperate with "their" code. They were never meant as a means for you to "clone" their product. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It describes how to call functionality within the other codebase.
I'm kind of on the fence on this one. It seems to me that if you own a license of a product that then deliberately "clone" the API of that product to replace it with your own that you could be violating the license of that product. Google knowingly created a "clone" of the Java JVM rather that creating their own language like MSFT did. While C# is arguably heavily influenced by Java, it is still its own distinct language with its own API calls where you cannot directly port java code without modification.
Google not only cloned Java but continues to refer to "Java" throughout their documentation and call the language that you code against Dalvik "JAVA". That is my mind crosses the line.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That's why the Google mantra is "Do No Evil" (and get caught) while the Oracle Mantra is "Be The Evil"
"bad news for developers"
:)
In the U.S.A., that is.
On a sidenote, groklaw says the judge has asked the parties to reflect upon the EU court's decision on APIs being non-copyrightable. Should be a nice exercise
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Then there is no valid patent.
If this whole mess turns south, and Google can't use the current Android anymore, couldn't it just switch the codebase to be a derivative of OpenJDK?
Sun/Oracle relaesed OpenJDK under the GPL. That means as long as you use OpenJDK, you can use their copyrighted works. All they would have to do is port the bits from current Android (like the bytecode interpreter and extra classes) to OpenJDK. Then release that as Android 5 or something.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
I wouldn't worry about Kernighan asking for anything.... I'd be worried that AT&T will got hold of this idea (as I believe they hold the copyrights to the c programming language)
Im not agree with the information displayed here.
No, the purpose of an API is to serve as a fixed interface between two layers of a program. It has nothing to do with "your" vs. "their" code.