Oracle Not Satisfied With Potential $150,000; Goes Against Judge's Warning

bobwrit writes with news about how the monetary damages in the Google v. Oracle case might shake out. On Thursday, Judge Alsup told Oracle the most it could expect for statutory damages was a flat $150,000, a far cry from the $6.1 billion Oracle wanted in 2011, or even the $2.8 million offered by Google as a settlement. However, Oracle still thinks it can go after infringed profits, even though Judge Alsup specifically warned its lawyers they were making a mistake. He said, "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions." Groklaw has a detailed post about today's events.

Comments

U.S. court systems

[sierrajudas]

RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!

Someone should look into US court system.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

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This is your future. You shall return to Gamemakerdom!

Re:U.S. court systems

[betterunixthanunix]

Blatantly abusing the copyright of a full 9 lines of code? When I was teaching introductory CS courses, we would not even accuse students of cheating over 9 identical lines of code.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Sarten-X]

I would like to convert to Gamemakerdom, as I believe it to be preferable to PHP, but I cannot acquire the money for the license. If you buy it for me, I will join the bliss of Gamemakerful Nirvana.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should look into US court system.

For anyone who could seriously do that, it's already rigged up just the way they want.

I wish the Liberals would stop your obsessive fixation on "the rich" and focus instead on "the powerful". Money, political office, and media access are all forms of power. You fixate on one (wealth) like you do and you become blind to how the others are also being abused.

You have any idea how petty and childish you sound when you worry about trivia like Warren Buffet's secretary? What exactly is the point of that when the court system destroys families who did little or no harm (sharing mp3s) while giving megacorps symbolic slaps on the wrist to create the illusion of accountability?

If Occupy was something more than a bunch of naive hippies they would be Occupying the old-money families and the media companies, not public parks. Not that I am sayin' that's a good idea, just sayin' the fact they aren't doing this says a lot about how deeply they comprehend the problem.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!

Someone should look into US court system.

This comment is so bloated with troll and stupid ... I believe my brain bled by reading it.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey look, another bonch stockpuppet gets the first post with an anti-Google post.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, not this fucking anti-Google troll again. What a worthless repugnant human being. I bet his mother prays he gets hit by a bus, preferably being dragged for thirty miles before being shaken loose, sent careening into a tar pond where, two million years from now, he'll be dug up, recognized as the evil little bastard that he is, and put on display as "Microsoftus uptheassus".

Re:U.S. court systems

[Githaron]

Not only that but the function is so simple that it could have been a complete accident.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Teachers would be more tempted to accuse students of cheating if the school had a bounty of ten million dollars per caught student.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Joce640k]

Anybody know what the nine lines are?

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineer has admitted he "probably" copy-pasted the code over.

(Google wasn't exactly running a 'clean room', and Android engineers were also contributing to Sun Java.)

Re:U.S. court systems

[tomhath]

And it shouldn't be 9 lines anyway. Someone doesn't know how to use OR in a boolean expression. Looks like they were trying to get their LOC metric up

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

"Psst... Hey pal, you're dying of cancer, and everyone's pretty happy about it."

Re:U.S. court systems

[thegarbz]

You're soft. Back when I was teaching CS courses we punished students for copying even 1 line of code.

Not a lot of people passed. Had something to do with "int main() {". Hmmm I wonder if that line has been copyrighted...

- Larry P.

Re:U.S. court systems

[uncqual]

Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

The engineer made was rewriting the sort function for dalvik and contributed it back to java. He was the original author of the java sort function, and reused the java sort range check function since he believed it would all be reintegrated back into the the original java sort.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Githaron]

Barring formatting changes, considering the exception is different depending on the case, there would still need to be nine lines. I do wonder why they did not use the if/else construct though. I seems kind of wasteful to run checks on cases at are no longer possible.

Re:U.S. court systems

[foradoxium]

university of phoenix does.

Re:U.S. court systems

[nedlohs]

Because after the exception is thrown we magically just move on to the next if?

Re:U.S. court systems

[jimshatt]

Those checks aren't run because an exception is thrown before that.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Kalriath]

Sure, because only Microsoft dislikes Google. Couldn't be Apple, or Yahoo, or the government, or just a private individual.

Re:U.S. court systems

[DVega]

Not only simple and small. The author of both copies is the same person: Josh Bloch. He wrote the original lines while working for Sun, and repeated the same code while working for Google. So, according the law, Josh Bloch plagiarized himself

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! You remembered to post AC this time. Good Job!

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

okay, I've seen the level of difficulty of a university of phoenix programming class and some of the final projects could be written in under 9 lines of code..

Re:U.S. court systems

[mrbester]

Not only that but the function doesn't work unless there is some sort of zero indexed array whose highest index is equal to the array length.

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

Liberals spend all their time diverting attention away from everything else and just focus on the income tax. They also screw with the economy to the point that any 'poor' person has to go and beg the government to live.

Perfect example of this would be where I live. Developers saw an explosive population boom in our area, and wanted to build a small town with lots of apartments. All the liberals freaked out and forced them to build endless lines of McMansions, and called it the 'rural crescent'. They claimed they were saving the enviorment, which is a huge load of crap. Apartments house people much more efficiently power wise, and make mass transit much easier. It's absolutely impossible to implement mass transit in this 'rural crescent'. The rest of the county has it now, and for over ten years has yet to be financially stable. They''ll probably never bother in this new area, they know it's just not feasible.

And what about the poor (working class) that can't afford a POS $500,000 house? Tough shit. Maybe you can spend all day in line the one day every 4 years the waiting list for government housing(that doesn't exist) is open.

But hey, maybe the poor will save a couple hundred dollars a year in income tax. But in the mean time they can't afford a place to live, gas to get work through the ridiculous traffic(worst in the nation) or anything else that comes with this 'Utopian, environmentally friendly' new community.

Re:U.S. court systems

[sjames]

Yes, because there's so many powerful poor people and so many powerless rich people.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Arker]

RIAA has been awarded millions in their pursuits against individuals who gave some music away. Then we have a company that is blatantly abusing copyright laws and makes tens of billions an year, and they get punished $150,000!

Someone should look into US court system.

I was actually thinking the same thing. And you're at -1 flamebait at the moment for speaking it. Oh well I can burn some karma if need be, because this needs to be said.

Not that there is anything wrong with what google did here that I can see, that's not the point at all, but dont you see the double-standard here? When the RIAA sues a private individual for alleged non-commercial copyright infringement, they throw the book at them. When google gets caught here, and I would argue that the 9 lines are de minimis and probably functionally determined and the court is wrong on this, BUT, it appears that is not what the court has decided, so let's go with that. Google infringed copyright, commercially no less! and... the judge is (quite rightly) informing oracle that despite this determination the damage is minimal and therefore their recovery is likely to be a LOT less than their lawyer fees.

Great. But why doesnt it work that way when the RIAA sues somebodies grandmother over a Britney Spears recording? Surely that is an even more minor issue than what google is stuck with here, yet the punishment would likely be far greater. That's all I am saying.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Barbara, not Barbie]

pretty much any c program can be written in under 9 lines of code. Of course, some of those lines will be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long ...

Re:U.S. court systems

[shutdown -p now]

Just like copyright infringement is not theft, it's also not plagiarism.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have a very superficial grasp of modern society. The world must be very easy for you to understand.

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

I'd be anonymous too if that was the best attempt at being condescending I could come up with.

Re:U.S. court systems

[nedlohs]

So show the code using OR in boolean expressions if it is so simple.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! You still fail at hiding the fact that you're sockpuppeting!

Re:U.S. court systems

[__aaltlg1547]

Oracle is out exactly nothing because of Google's infringement. Google's benefit from using that code instead of rolling their own -- and they clearly intended to roll their own -- was less than an hour of a competent programmers time. So the benefit to Google was at most $200.

Copyright law is not intended to protect a few lines of code. It's intended to protect the ownership and merchantability of a significant body of work.

Let's hope they award Oracle what they ACTUALLY LOST by Google's mistake.

Re:U.S. court systems

[xero314]

Interestingly enough, if you do the math you will see that the poor out number the rich by a large enough amount that the poor are more powerful than the rich. But make sure the poor never actually catch on to that fact or else they might actually use their power.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was in university taking an assembly language class, the prof. accused 9 people of cheating (plagiarism). I was one of them. I did the assignment on my own. Someone asked the prof. if it was possible to get the correct result with code that was different. He hummed for a while (there were only about 15 lines of code). Ultimately, he admitted that there was no other correct solution.

Re:U.S. court systems

[makomk]

In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Grishnakh]

Powerful people aren't all super-rich. There's a lot of politicians (esp. at lower levels: city mayors, for instance) who are really just middle-class. Of course, the corrupt ones try to use their position to vault themselves into the rich classes. The OP has a good point; we should be watching out for these people, to prevent them from succeeding in that quest (where they'll become both rich and more powerful).

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

I don't know where you live, but where I live and across most of the country the liberals are the ones pushing high density housing. The McMansions were built by the unrestricted greed is good set. There are things liberals don't get right, but this isn't one of them.

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

This is in Virginia.

Re:U.S. court systems

[TheLink]

Given the little I understand about coding, there are usually zillions of ways (many convoluted) to come up with the correct results if you don't care about doing it very well, don't care about performance, storage, robustness or readability. You could write a program to write a large subset of the possible programs.

When you do care, the number of solutions goes down.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Sudline]

Thanks you, troll of the day. The point is not about how money makes Google but how money it make with infringing code that is near zéro.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope they award Oracle what they ACTUALLY LOST by Google's mistake.

which, lets face it, was nothing.. thats right, Oracle actually lost nothing from this, but Google has spent quite a bit of money defending a baseless suit.. perhaps they should award Google costs of the court case times three, as a punishment for Oracle

Re:U.S. court systems

[symbolset]

But wait... this RangeCheck code is really critical. Apparently Android does RangeCheck 2600 times on boot. And Windows does it 40 times. So obviously RangeCheck is some sort of OCD that is unnecessary. Also, please buy antivirus because we're not sure how Windows apps get exploited.

Re:U.S. court systems

[dontmakemethink]

I have the perfect analogy for this. I'm a sound engineer, and for mixing live shows on digital consoles I can save my mix parameters of a band onto a USB key and recall them onto a same-model digital board in a competing music venue. If I load the mix I was paid to prepare by venue A into the console at competing venue B, does venue A have the right to sue venue B?

The answer is this: if I charged venue B less because I'd already done the work paid for by venue A, then venue A could reasonably claim half the difference. So at best, Google owes Oracle half the cost Sun paid Mr Bloch specifically to write those precious 9 lines of code. Oracle should take the $150,000 and run before they're ordered to pay Google's legal bill, which is inevitable if they push this any farther.

Re:U.S. court systems

[dontmakemethink]

Copyright infringement is not theft or plagiarism, it's tortuous interference. If you provide to people a copyrighted work when they could only otherwise get it legitimately by paying the copyright holder, you're on the hook for the copyright holder's losses. Just because you don't understand piracy doesn't mean you get to pretend it's ok.

Re:U.S. court systems

[sjames]

Certainly they're not all super rich, particularly at the city/town level. However, even there they tent to be quite upper middle class. Far enough that the lower class sees them as rich. Lets just say that for them, total blow out economic disaster means they are forced to retire into a modest but comfortable middle class existence, not end up on welfare like much of the middle class would.

That is, their worst case is what many if not most aspire to.

It is reasonable to say though that they tend to have the ear and patronage of the rich and most of their resources. Their financial realities track the rich more closely than the rest of us.

All that said, they're not the powerful ones, they're the well rewarded instruments of other's power.

Re:U.S. court systems

[aix tom]

No it isn't.

- An IllegalArgumentException is thrown if the toIndex parameter less than the fromIndex parameter.
- An ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException indicating that fromIndex is the problematic parameter is thrown when the fromIndex is less than 0
- An ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException indicating that toIndex is the problematic parameter is thrown when the toIndex is bigger than the array length

Three different cases, three different problems that need to be reported back in three different exceptions.

Of course if someone calls has ALL those three wrong (for example by passing -7 as fromIndex and -10 as toIndex for an array from 0 to 4 ) then only the first is raised and not the two other problems.

Re:U.S. court systems

[aix tom]

And while completely understanding the Java code, I had problems parsing the English that your (jimshatt's) reply was already to a post mentioning the "wastefulness" of the other checks, so that the exception is OF COURSE already "thrown before that.", so you are perfectly correct. Sorry. ;-P

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

Well, that's plausible. Virginia is a red state, so you don't have a ton of liberals to begin with, and it's also a more rural state, so you don't have the more typical urban liberals.

So I'll give you 2 things to consider:

1) Liberals are broadly anti-sprawl. Enough so that there have actually been incidences of extremists on the left setting fire to the kinds of developments that bother you.

2) I don't know anything about Virginia politics, but given how red Virginia is, the right/Republicans ought to have had sufficient legislative control to prevent the McMansions situation. That they didn't indicates a problem either in competence or in will.

Re:U.S. court systems

[betterunixthanunix]

http://notavailablein.ca/2012/05/googles-infringement-against-oracle-9-lines-of-code/

Re:U.S. court systems

[sco08y]

You fuckers were sweethearts. In my day we'd beat students black and blue if their encoded assignments used the same bits! Made them tough! And stupid! Just the way we liked 'em.

Re:U.S. court systems

[sco08y]

The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.

The problem with remarks like this is that when you try to nail down who "the rich" are, they inevitably become "people who run everything", so it's effectively a tautology. So there's some vast conspiracy of people "controlling" everything, except you can never find any ultimate point to it. Money? They're already rich and have more money than any of them need. Power? They already have it all, and further, what are they supposedly *doing* with it?

It's a popular notion, but total bullshit.

And you can disprove it, yourself, by simply contacting your representative. They really are very approachable and really do listen to constituents. Find an issue you're concerned about, write a letter to your representative or senator, or get them on the phone. It's that simple. If you're too lazy to do that, fine, but don't cry about how awful your government is.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Grishnakh]

I live in Tempe, Arizona, a city of 161,000 in the Phoenix metro area. We're currently having a (very nasty) mayoral race. One of the candidates, Mark Mitchell, has been on the city council for 10 years, and is the son of a one-term US Congressman, Harry Mitchell. His current occupation is part-time carpet salesman. That's not exactly something rich people do. I once saw his father shopping at the local Fry's grocery store (which is one of the cheaper stores around here; it's a little higher-class than Food City (where everything is in Spanish), but it's not as nice as Albertson's, and certainly not at the level of AJ's Fine Foods or Whole Foods. Of course, Harry (the senior) was only a Congressman for a single term, so maybe you have to be in there a while to get rich from your connections. Anyway, the point is, from what I can tell, the city councilpeople here aren't rich people. I'm not sure about the former mayors. However, many political positions like this can and are used as stepping-stones to higher positions, where you can have the ear and patronage of even richer people and their resources as you say. I'm quite sure that's Mark Mitchell's goal in this. His whole campaign is mostly about pushing for some stupid giant conference center downtown (at taxpayer expense of course), something we have absolutely no need for, and he was instrumental in getting our nice little Mill Avenue (a street next to the university that used to be full of small, quaint businesses) ruined by pushing out the small mom-n-pop shops and replacing them with big corporate chain stores from the malls, which of course all went out of business when the economy crashed leaving the street a disaster, plus ruining the parking situation by building expensive underground parking and replacing the free parking lots with giant condo hi-rises which are all unfinished and sitting empty. The guy's all about bringing in big businesses to supposedly increase the tax base, and of course his own power; a very typical Democrat. (For some reason, many people think Democrats are for the small guy, but it's total BS, they're just as much for big business as the Republicans.)

Re:U.S. court systems

[kdemetter]

Just looked at the code : that's function isn't even needed , Java will throw an IndexOutOfBoundsException, you could just catch that and handle it.
You might as well copyright a for each loop.

Re:U.S. court systems

[sjames]

from his official bio:

Mitchell is a native of Tempe where he is a member of the Kiwanis Club of Tempe, Tempe Diablos, Tempe Leadership Class XV, Tempe Sister Cities, Tempe Impact Education Foundation, Tempe YMCA and a Board member of East Valley Partnership. Mitchell is currently on the Board of Directors for the National League of Cities (NLC), is the past Chair of the NLC City Futures Community and Regional Development Panel and a Board member for the NLC University Community Council. Mitchell is the past Chair of the University Community Council. Mitchell serves as the Vice President for the Executive Committee for the Arizona League of Cities and Towns.

Think about it, he has a family. If he could support them AND a political campaign on the income of a part-time carpet salesman, he'd have to have a metric assload of cash socked away. That doesn't make him super rich, but he's not exactly poor.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Hognoxious]

perhaps they should award Google costs of the court case times three, as a punishment for Oracle

That's what they do in other countries. Well some of them. It doesn't matter exactly how many, it's enough that it's totally un-American. Soviet Russia is un-American.

tl;dr: loser pays = commienissum.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Hognoxious]

Soft bastards. We had to invent our own language.

And that was in the second week of the first term.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Hognoxious]

I wish the Liberals would stop your obsessive fixation on "the rich" and focus instead on "the powerful". Money, political office, and media access are all forms of power.

From a purely logical point of view, you're 100% correct. If Socrates is a carrot and all lobsters are mortal, we cannot deduce one way or the other whether Plato is an alcoholic.

However draw me a Venn diagram with the rich people in red, the politicians in green, and the media barons in blue.

Assuming additive mixing, what do you think the ratio of white to primary colours and primary to secondary will be?

Re:U.S. court systems

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually read that fucking wall of text? You get marks for effort, that's for sure.

Re:U.S. court systems

[sjames]

Because the poor only have power in large numbers, the corruption is naturally averaged out. It also suffers great deals of inertia and communications overhead that the power of a single rich and powerful person doesn't have to deal with.

The divisibility of a collective also means that in a power struggle, individuals stand to suffer far greater consequences than individuals with significant wealth and power.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

Are you kidding? What they're doing with it is ensuring maintenance on the status quo where possible, and gradually shifting the wealth created by our society even more into their control in order to reduce social mobility.

I contact my representative regularly. They don't respond. I try to get people to vote them out of office. It isn't working. I'm not capable of being persuasive enough to achieve the kind of change we need.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Terrasque]

You had languages!? Oh, we used to DREAM about having languages!

We had to bash our head into a sharp metal spike until the right bits were randomly generated, or we passed out from blood loss.

And after that, for the failed students, the professor would rip their skin off and make punch cards from it!

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

To be more specific, this was Northern VA, Prince William County to be exact.

McMansions are very profitable, so thats mostly what developers are interested in when they have smaller tracts of land. So thats what got built all over the rest of the country.

This was pretty much that last major development in the county. At first, everyone was against it because of all the other developments. People on both side just wanted it done. But the population was booming and something had to be done. So it very quickly turned into the conservatives fighting for a free market vs the liberals fighting sprawl under the guise of protecting the environment.

Lack of will power could explain it, to be honest though, I think no one really gave a damn as far as planning intelligently. Just mindless short sighted politics(on both sides) that goes on in this country all the time.

I wish they would set fire to it, it's gonna be a mess after everything gets bulldozed after all the foreclosures.

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

I forgot to mention Northern VA is a lot more liberal than the rest of the state. It's almost a completely different state.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

Yeah, sadly I'd have to agree with the shortsightedness on both sides. As much as I dislike the right's ideas, the left's leadership is useless for actually trying to get anything done. Depressingly, the right seems to have the more capable leaders in this generation (not that any of them are superb, but the right's seem stronger).

Re:U.S. court systems

[sco08y]

Are you kidding? What they're doing with it is ensuring maintenance on the status quo where possible, and gradually shifting the wealth created by our society even more into their control in order to reduce social mobility.

Reduce social mobility, what is this, neo-feudalism? How? And to what end? When you're making less sense than the plot of the X-Files, you're doing it wrong.

I contact my representative regularly. They don't respond.

Really, they don't even answer the phone?

I try to get people to vote them out of office. It isn't working. I'm not capable of being persuasive enough to achieve the kind of change we need.

Two problems: the point isn't to get people out of office, it's to get your guy into office. That means you first need to have your guy. Second, you're confusing what "you want" with what "we need." To be persuasive, you have to be honest and admit that you've got an agenda like everyone else. Until you do that, you can't find common interest with others and put a movement together.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

Re: social mobility:

how: by reducing the distribution of the wealth production of the country. The statistics don't lie, it has happened.

why: to reduce the capability of the lower classes to disrupt their wealth/control in the short or long term.

And indeed, my representative does not answer the phone. She has glad handers to do it for her.

And yes, obviously I'm trying to get someone else elected when I say I'm trying to get her out. And of course I have an agenda, everyone does, that's the very definition of politics. I happen to believe, earnestly, that my goals align better with the interests of the vast majority of the population.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Coren22]

That's why my card punch used triangles!

Re:U.S. court systems

[P-niiice]

So your best example as to Liberal meddling in the economy is the fact that Liberals where you are insisted that they live in McMansions instead of apartments, and they hate mass transit? Where do the conservatives live, in eco-friendly apartments with plenty of bus service? Also why did a bunch of liberals move in and not conservatives? Was there some conservative ethnic cleansing driving them in from somewhere else or something?

Re:U.S. court systems

[shibashaba]

You make far too many assumptions for me to even try to discuss anything with you.

Where you got ethnic cleansing from, that this was my best example, that liberals wanted to live in a certain place, etc is all beyond me and I'm sure anyone else.

Are you even old enough to vote?

Re:U.S. court systems

[MikeBabcock]

What you said was true until you used the word 'piracy' which is loaded and invalid.

"Copyright Infringement" is all it is, piracy is something else entirely that implies theft of a physical item that cannot be duplicated for free (and often death of the original owner).

Re:U.S. court systems

[MikeBabcock]

Or its possible that your opinion is in the minority and shouldn't win out in a democracy.

Re:U.S. court systems

[Surt]

Absolutely. There is a critical difference between being right and being popular.

Re:U.S. court systems

[MikeBabcock]

Democracy has little to do with the first :)

Re:U.S. court systems

[causality]

In theory, the poor may collectively be more powerful than the rich, but because there's more of them the costs associated with actually organising and exercising that power are higher. For instance, suppose a handful of wealthy billionaires think that they want the law changed in a particular way that benefits them. Because their individual benefits from the change are high and they each have lots of resources, they can rationally afford to carry out their own in-depth analysis of what the law change does and whether it will benefit them and to follow it as it passes through Congress to make sure that it doesn't get amended in detrimental ways. It'd be irrational for poor individuals to each carry out this kind of in-depth analysis of whether laws benefit them because their individual expected gain from expending the time and resources required to do so is so much smaller than the cost, leaving them reliant on third-party sources of information like Fox News which have their own - often conflicting - interests.

Old thread I know.. but wanted to weigh in here all the same.

The poor and the middle class are their own worst enemies. Do you know why? Because when monied interests air advertising, TV interviews, and press releases to try and convince everyone else to vote their way, the average person (who is not wealthy) just eats that shit up. You know what the average person does not do, not even when the issue is important to them? They don't inform themselves. They don't take a hard look at who benefits from the suggested action, what the consequences could be, or whether other societies which did similar things lived to regret it. They think that's someone else's job.

In the Information Age they have absolutely no excuse for this. You don't even have to drive to your library anymore. It's as though they sincerely believe that political agendas and monied interests are going to be completely honest with them and truthfully tell them all about the downsides of their proposals. They do not seem to comprehend that advertising is the most biased information source imaginable, and that not all advertising is clearly labelled as such. Much of it tries to pass for legitimate news.

Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Leebert]

But there is no way that Slashdot will call attention to this in a regular story:

http://investors.geek.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=672629

Excerpt:

FAIRFAX, Va., May 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Geeknet, Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT), the online network for the global geek community, today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized the Company and its advisors to explore strategic alternatives with respect to its online media business, including the SourceForge, Slashdot and Freecode websites. The Company and its advisors will evaluate a range of options to maximize shareholder value, including, but not limited to, a potential sale of the Company's online media business, investing additional capital to expand the online media business, or other possible transactions involving the online media business.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120510/MM05555LOGO)

Ken Langone, Chairman and CEO of Geeknet, stated, "After much discussion, our management team and Board of Directors have decided to begin a formal review of our media business to realize the full potential of these valuable assets and maximize shareholder value. With more than 46 million total unique visitors last month, our media properties have a large community of engaged users and we are committed to creating the best online experience for them."

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Jeng]

Well, that does explain Bonch.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[postbigbang]

They've tried to fatten up instead of building muscle. Perhaps News Corp will be hungry for more acquisitions.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

GreatBunzinni, real name Rui Maciel, has been using anonymous posts and sockpuppets to accuse nearly 20 people of being employed by a PR firm to astroturf Slashdot, without any evidence. Using his sockpuppets, he mods up these anonymous posts while modding down the accused in order to filter their viewpoints. GreatBunzinni accidentally outed himself as the anonymous troll who has been posting these accusations. For example, he wrote the same post almost verbatim, first using his logged-in account followed by an anonymous post days later. Note the use of the same script and wording.

It turns out GreatBunzinni is a 31-year-old C++/Java programmer from Almada, Portugal named Rui Maciel, with a civil engineering degree from Instituto Superior Técnico and a hobby working with electronics. He runs Kubuntu and is active on the KDE mailing list. Rui Maciel has accounts at OSNews, Launchpad, ProgrammersHeaven, the Ubuntu forums, and of course Slashdot.

Most of the users who Rui targets have done nothing else but criticize Google for something or praise a competitor. Many of them are subscribers who get the first post because subscribers see stories earlier than non-subscribers. After one of Rui's accusations gets posted, the original post receives a surge of "Troll" and "Overrated" moderations from his sockpuppets, while Rui's posts get modded up. Often, additional anonymous posters will appear to give support and receive upmods. At the same time, accused users who defend themselves are modded "Offtopic."

Rui Maciel's contact information
Email: greatbunzinni@gmail.com, greatbunzinni@engineer.com, or rui.maciel@gmail.com
IM: greatbunzinni@jabber.org (the same Jabber account currently listed on his Slashdot account)
Blog: http://rui_maciel.users.sourceforge.net/
Programming projects: http://www.programmersheaven.com/user/GreatBunzinni/contributions

The following accounts have been confirmed to be Rui Maciel, in order of activity. You'll notice that they all share a posting style and often reply to each other:

HarrySquatter
Galestar
GameboyRMH
ZeroSumHappiness
Jeng
scot4875
Nerdfest
TheNarrator
flurp
anonymov
chrb
zidium
NicknameOne
Nicknamename
forkfail
icebike
ilguido
psiclops
Toonol
russotto
rreyelts
symbolset

tl;dr: An Ubuntu fan named Rui Macie

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Geeknet's management review have to do with some Slashdot user you're obsessed with? I don't get it.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Wow. You must... like... really care... and shit.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[MightyMartian]

It's all part of his strange sexual perversion. I suggest you look away before he really gets going. Think John Travolta with a keyboard here.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Geeknet's management review have to do with some Slashdot user you're obsessed with? I don't get it.

It doesn't, but his post does show Slashdot's moderation system failing in a significant way. Or in other words, how Slashdot's moderation system can be manipulated with so few people.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

bonch is a Slashdot employee/intern whose job it is to generate page views by trolling and inciting conspiracy theories.

There will be a huge spike of traffic right before Slashdot is sold off yet again ('its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house') and then, job done, bonch and his army of sockpuppets will disappear.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it really doesn't, because most of his claims are no longer accurate as the posts in question were eventually moderated and metamoderated to the appropriate levels. Yes, posts get incorrectly modded up and down in the first 30 minutes of a stories life, but that's the nature of crowdsourcing. You simply can't expect to get a constant flow of great information, only that the quality of your information will increase with it's quantity; the more moderation points spent, the better the quality of the moderation. It's not a perfect system, or even a good system, it's just better than all the shitty alternatives. At any given time, you might see a bunch of shitty mods. Just like how at any given time, any Wikipedia article might be completely inaccurate garbage. This is what you get when you crowdsource.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[binarylarry]

I know I do, that fucking guy is annoying.

Mod GP up so the assholes at geeknet do something about this guy.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[ExploHD]

Read: "We, the board and CEO, think that we can extract much more money out these web sites. Once they get to a point where we know they're overvalued, they will be sold off so we can pocket more than what 99% of the population will make in their lifetime."

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Kalriath]

They'd roll Slashdot into Fox Interactive, then promptly migrate it to XenForo. *shudder*

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[NeutronCowboy]

And this is what happens when you go public. Screw the user community, doing something cool, or even just being profitable. No, you have to grow and maximize shareholder value. In other words, all hail the next quarter, and screw the next year. execs can offload their shares and make millions while the company tanks.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Ken Langone, Chairman and CEO of Geeknet, stated, "After much discussion, our management team and Board of Directors have decided to begin a formal review of our media business to realize the full potential of these valuable assets and maximize shareholder value.

Translation: We need bigger bonuses---right now!

With more than 46 million total unique visitors last month, our media properties have a large community of engaged users and we are committed to creating the best online experience for them.

Translation: Squeeze Taco's little lemmings for all the coin they're worth.

And lo, thus did Slashdot die, to a stampede of pop-up advertisements.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, GeekNet has had a longer-than-expected stay in the following place:

3. ??

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it really doesn't, because most of his claims are no longer accurate as the posts in question were eventually moderated and metamoderated to the appropriate levels.

Looking at Bonch's post history, I don't see anything that warrants the downmods or constant shill accusations. For example, why is this comment -1 Troll? Because it talks about Google facing antitrust scrutiny in Europe? That's just a true statement of fact. If anything, Bonch comes off as just some iPhone developer who posts on Slashdot and gets targeted because gets first posts and doesn't defend Google in every story.

I've been on the receiving end of subversive moderation before after saying something that pissed off a cyber-stalker or two. Comment manipulation does happen on Slashdot, but it's really in the direction of censoring posts that don't follow the conventional wisdom dictated by the crowd.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Anonymous Coward]

If GKNT chooses option 'A' (sell the "online media properties", presumably so they can stick to their core mission of selling tech-themed coffee cups and t-shirts), here is what I've come up:

I'm sure the staff at /. are hoping that Tim O'Reilly will step in as a white knight.

Crazy like a fox Michael Robertson of "Lindows" fame, possibly.

There's no hope that Yahoo or Google will, as they might have about eight years ago before the financial crash. They both have plenty of issues of their own to worry about.

The usual angel suspects Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Charles Simonyi etc. wouldn't be interested... not futuristic enough for them.

The guy at Techdirt would love to but he can't afford it.

Some clueless European outfit that nobody in the US has heard of, is always a possibility.

I think one issue that a potential buyer would have, is the degree to which /. has become the pro-piracy, anti-RIAA/MPAA/BSA site. We see this literally every day, as an article on the piracy issue goes up and hundreds of posters all fall on one side of the issue, and get +5 mods. Any poster on the other side gets modded down. This would be regarded as unfriendly to a business based on digital IP.

Re:Yes, I know this is off-topic

[Coren22]

Perhaps because it is a troll? The article is about a research paper trying to make the point that search results should be considered free speech, what does that have to do with antitrust?

I, for one, am shocked

[reiserifick]

that lawyers would ignore the advice of the judge and pursue ridiculous sums of money with no basis.

Re:I, for one, am shocked

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably isn't their decision. Big boss told them he wants his money against what the lawyers and judges probably say.

Re:I, for one, am shocked

[jd]

The lawyers will be paid by Oracle, win or lose. They won't get paid if they're not involved in a lawsuit. Oracle wants them involved in a lawsuit that they will probably lose. Turning Oracle down is an expensive way to be ethical.

Those racing yachts cost money

[spirit_fingers]

You have to feel sorry for Larry. He was hoping the Google settlement would pay his America's Cup expenses. $150k will barely cover In-N-Out burgers for the deck hands.

Re:Those racing yachts cost money

[steelfood]

Not at all. I hear Larry's pretty happy about the outcome actually.

Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

On the one hand, Oracle is giving up a potential maximum of $150,000 in statutory damages -- but in fact it would likely be rather less. On the other hand, if they go for actual damages they can get a ridiculous chunk of money and force Google to turn over all sorts of information on Google's profits if they win on that claim. $150,000 is peanuts to Oracle, so of course they're going to go for the moon.

I suspect they will end up with zero or token damages instead.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Xtifr]

I'm thinking that $9 (one dollar for each copied line) sounds like a nice number. :)

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[postbigbang]

This is one starving law firm and legal department. Imagine taking this to the ends of the earth.

Secret lawfirm partners meeting chatter:

"Hey, with over fifty time keepers running on this thing, it might go negative numbers, but we'll keep the rep that we'll burn every litigation right down to the bitter end. After all, this isn't about who wins, it's who has more kerosene..."

"What do they care, after all. With a 8% COGS, and a stock price that's at insane multiple of earnings, they have to continue make Google look stupid. After all, they desperately want to be 'in the game' since the Sun acquisition boiled off and their server game is barely chugging. Good thing they have that database thing-oil well in the basement."

Feel free to add your own plausible remarks.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[jd]

Old, wizened lawyer #1: "If we agree to Oracle's naive, stupid and utterly doomed plan, we will make ourselves look extremely stupid to the geeks."

Old, wizened lawyer #2: "The geeks can't afford us anyway, so who cares what they think? We'll make gob-loads of money off Oracle. Imagine what we can buy with that?"

Middle-aged, blue, slightly-fuzzy lawyer that looks remarkably like a sock puppet: "Coooooookies!!!!! Mrumrumrumrumrumrumrum"

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and, of course, triple it for damages.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

You suck at copyright math.

For a start, you forgot to multiply it by number of Android devices in existence! Recent claims by Google was something like 300m Android devices. Let's extrapolate a bit, by now it should be something around 350. Let's say 375.

375M * 9 = 3.375 billion dollars.

But wait, there's more! Google blatantly helped infringement by distributing Android sources to _everyone_. We can't calculate how many precisely infringed on Oracle's copyright by downloading the sources, so let's conservatively say 100 millions.

This makes the sum go up to 4.275 billion dollars, but let's just make it nice and round, 4 and a half.

Yep, now that looks like a legit copyright infringement fine to me, not like your misguided "$9".

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[BooRadley]

I really wish I had mod points for this. Thank you, sir.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the 9 lines were absolutely trivial and unimportant, as is obvious since once they were identified, they were removed.

So 9 lines out of millions (probably comments or some standard subroutine or formula of which there are a thousand variants) - 150 k total for violation - divide by several million, multiply by 9 equates to about 90 cents with interest.

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Xtifr]

You do realize that the 9 lines were absolutely trivial and unimportant

Huh? Oh, sorry, I was distracted by realizing that my silly joke above somehow got moderated "Informative". I really have to wonder what the mods are on sometimes!

Yeah, trivial and unimportant. Trivial enough that any programmer (I won't even bother to qualify that with "competent") could probably reproduce in no more than five minutes just from the name alone. Trivial enough that to get nine lines, they must have been counting whitespace and braces. Yeah, nine dollars is probably more than it's worth. I just thought it would be funny--and Google sure doesn't care about the difference between $9 and 90 cents. :)

Re:Its a no-brainer for Oracle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you suck at copyright math. One work, one infringement.

Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[catmistake]

What the fuck are they talking about...? Google pirated a GPLed programming language and used it in Android?!! What damages could Oracle possibly be listing? I wanna know. Show the damages, Oracle.

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[betterunixthanunix]

Clearly, if Google had not developed Android, Oracle would have been able to market its own smartphone/tablet OS using Java, right?

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Mike Buddha]

Yeah, because they were headed in that direction anyway. What? You don't remember Java Phone 7? iJava? JavaCE? JavaOS? PalmJava? JavaGo? Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of something else...

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because they were headed in that direction anyway. What? You don't remember Java Phone 7? iJava? JavaCE? JavaOS? PalmJava? JavaGo? Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of something else...

You're speaking of Java Desktop, which was neither Java nor a desktop; its GUI. What you're thinking about though, is the Oracle ORDBMS 11g Phone, which stands for Oracle Relational Data... no... wait... (can't be Oracle Oracle, right?) so stands for Object Relational Doodoo Bowel Movement Shit... something like that... and 11g because, or was it 10g? That's a lot of g, I should think... anyway, failed not because of Android's development, but because it was far too heavy, like 10 or 11 times heavier than it looked. I'm pretty sure it ran a rebranded Solaris, ran on solar power... or... I think it had apps they called queers written in postgres++ ... I can't remember.

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google wrote their own VM implementation that was compatible with GPL'd APIs, slightly less onerous terms used are my own.

Since APIs are NOT copyrightable, no damage done, that being the case, please Oracle, show us the real damage - show us the real losses?

Don't try and pull a *FIAA bullshit line and claim *potential sales* as losses as we all know that's a fucktard's way out, which is why the fucktards of the RIAA/MPAA use them regularly.

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

And where did all these go? Absolutely nowhere.. oh, right, that was the point of your post.... sorry.

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because they were headed in that direction anyway. What? You don't remember Java Phone 7? iJava? JavaCE? JavaOS? PalmJava? JavaGo? Hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of something else...

Java ME, which had been a nice little earner for them before Android came along and provided something much better. (Images of Larry kicking a chair and shouting "The bastards, how dare they kill our market by making a better product!")

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[mdragan]

From the begining of Java, until this day, Sun/Oracle have not been able to write a decent browser plugin to run graphics/GUI applications.
How much luck would they have had with an embeded environment to do the same?
There lies the reason for Google going on to make their own implementation with different graphics/GUI libraries. And they sue Google because it did something they failed at? Pathetic!

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

SavaJe

Re:Oracle's damages? Because Android has Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

JavaME

Digg 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Slashdot is about to go down the corporate rabbit hole. This will most likey result in slashvertisements being the primary (and possibly only ) source of new stories. Is there any social media website out there that isn't slowly turning into shit?

Re:Digg 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

What you put in is what you get out.

The more social a media website is, the shittier it ends up being.

Re:Digg 2.0

[sortadan]

4chan is staying true to it's roots. Just yesterday they spent the whole night changing a Tea Party website to different incredibly offensive imagery and language after someone posted that the admin password was p9assw0rd. also reddit still had boat loads of cat pictures so there's that.

really though /. isn't doing too bad compared to ars or tech crunch. the only way i can stand them any more is through an rss feed, and even then just barely.

Re:Digg 2.0

[larry bagina]

Third time's the charm? Andover.net bought Slashdot. VA Linux bought Andover.net. Then renamed themselves a few times (VA Linux, VA Research, SourceForge, now Geek.Net). What's another company or another name at this point? Maybe next they can be facebook/linked in for nerds. NerdVirgIn.com.

Re:Digg 2.0

[DeadCatX2]

re: ars, I've sworn off all Conde Nast properties now. I saw the ars moderators engaging in what I thought was abuse of moderator powers, labeling posts "trolls" and getting them minimized when they probably didn't deserve it. A centralized authority picking and choosing what gets suppressed and what doesn't - not what I want to see in a comment system.

I remember when I could go to ars and read about the latest hardware architecture and why it will be better than the last. That was back in the P4 days. They're just not worth reading anymore.

Re:Digg 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any social media website out there that isn't slowly turning into shit?

4chan is staying true to it's roots.

So... They are not turning to shit?

Re:Digg 2.0

[hairyfeet]

I have to agree with Ars, its gotten this kind of political bent now that i find a turn off. I go to a geeky site to read about geeky things, the latest CPUs or GPUs or some cool project like the Pi, not to hear some mods thoughts on the politics of the day.

I'd say the only thing really wrong with /. is our crazys just aren't entertaining anymore...anybody remember Twitter? i miss twit, he could take ANY story and turn it into a convoluted plot involving Gates and the Illuminati, so even though he was batshit as hell he was damned entertaining. Now frankly the best we got is the crazies i call the "FOSSies" because of their Moonie like devotion to all things GPL but they have NO flair or entertainment value. Frankly they are like the trolls you'll get in DM that call everyone faggot or nigger, only they call everyone shill or astroturfer that dares not to believe in their "God". Hell look at this very thread, it wasn't three posts before someone screamed nigger or faggot, in this case the nigger or "shill" comment which was the second post.

So I say if you want to fix /. ban ACs completely. It takes less than 3 minutes to make an account and you can put down your are a member of the Swedish bikini team for all the system cares, so damned near all the ACs now are nigger faggot posts. of course with the fucked up mod system one has to surf in negative mode simply because a well thought out viewpoint will be buried for the first few hours of a post if it goes against groupthink, sure the metamods will eventually correct it but who goes back two or three days to look at stories?

So get rid of ACs, put a system in place that keeps up with who is modding who so we can get rid of "modbombs" by those with a chip on their shoulder, perhaps if they downmod the same person X number of times they are blocked from modpoints or maybe by IP address to keep sockpuppets down, I'm not a coder so I'll leave that to guys who know that stuff, all I know is frankly the nigger faggot shill astroturfer shit ruins flow and its nearly always ACs pulling the shit so a good place to start would be to get rid of them or at least have a setting where one can simply block ALL ACs from view if they are less than say a +2 rating.

Re:Digg 2.0

[Kalriath]

Also, I haven't seen Michael Kristopeit in a while. You know, cover in my shadow some more feeb and all that. Completely pathetic, blah blah.

Re:Digg 2.0

[hairyfeet]

I still think he was some sort of bot. I mean you had every account being "his name plus incremental number" which is the kind of thing a bot does, most humans will at least through SOME variation in there, even if its calling him Mike instead of Michael, and then his posts were always "insert piece of text from original post" followed by as you pointed out a predictable insult which was usually the same ones over and over and sometimes didn't even fit with the sentence piece culled, again smelt like a bot to me.

At least with twitter, while he did have FOSSie disease complete with a minor case of Voldemort (which for those that don't know, its a condition where they can NEVER type Microsoft or MSFT or MS, it always has to be "That other OS" or "M$", for an example please see Robert Pogson over at Linux Insider who has a severe case of Voldemort) he would weave these elaborate delusions around the narrative, for example he once posted that I was "A secret M$ representative in a facility in Redmond dedicated to destroying FOSS and run by Gates" which of course while completely batshit did make for a nice goldeneye style image of a secret lair complete with map of the world and Gates with a white kitteh.

hell we don't even get inventive ASCII art trolls or even a good nigger troll anymore, its all just copypasta of shit that was old when it was first sent over dialup. Now like I said its all similar to those 14 year old Halo players just spamming their favorite curse words, only with shill and troll and astroturfer taking the place of nigger, fag, and cunt. Not only does it totally break flow but frankly its boring as hell, just no spark of creativity or flair at all, kinda sad really.

Re:Digg 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you nigger faggot!

I for one hope that some of slashdot's better known posters (Carmack, Wozniak, Wheaton etc) still continue to post anonymously. And the people who aren't silly enough to sign up for an FBI tracking ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Facebook account.

And in conclusion, fuck you all!

Re:Digg 2.0

[Hognoxious]

What you put in is what you get out.

So you're a little dick?

Re:Digg 2.0

[Hognoxious]

Was that entire bastard last paragraph one unholy run-on sentence of doom?

Fucking hell, it was. Die soon, but not quickly.

Re:Digg 2.0

[Hognoxious]

At least with twitter, while he did have FOSSie disease complete with a minor case of Voldemort (which for those that don't know, its a condition where they can NEVER type Microsoft or MSFT or MS, it always has to be "That other OS" or "M$", for an example please see Robert Pogson over at Linux Insider who has a severe case of Voldemort) he would weave these elaborate delusions around the narrative, for example he once posted that I was "A secret M$ representative in a facility in Redmond dedicated to destroying FOSS and run by Gates" which of course while completely batshit did make for a nice goldeneye style image of a secret lair complete with map of the world and Gates with a white kitteh.

May the ghosts of Shakespeare, Dryden, Joyce, Donne, Swift & Shaw form a rota to rise from their rest and ensure you never find any. Stop it.

Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[DragonWriter]

Oracle can go after infringers profits, but in doing so it has to give up on statutory damages.

The Judge has pointed out that they haven't submitted any evidence supporting that Google has any profits associated with the rangeCheck method that is at issue, so this may not be a wise course of action.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Google doesn't make any direct profit on Android, I don't understand what Oracle are doing by going after their profits? The whole thing has been a huge joke from the beginning, Oracle should give up now before they embarrass themselves further.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[Kjella]

Awwwwwww judge, don't clue them in. I'd so like to see Oracle awarded $1 for this whole shenanigans, it'd be a much more embarrassing result than losing the case.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey fuckface, don't start shit in the subject like that. I hope you fucking bleed out of your ass and die.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[jrumney]

Maybe they are planning to show a graph of Oracle profits since its existance vs lines of code that Oracle owns. Then claim that by extrapolating that graph, 9 lines of code is worth a hundred billion dollars, "but ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are being nice by only claiming 6.1 billion".

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[marcosdumay]

Don't mind. If Oracle could by any means get any clue, they'd not be in this mess to start with.

They've already showed that they are completely willing to go against the orders of the judge, what makes you think they'll obey a recomendation?

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[flonker]

Not that it's entirely relevant, but indirect profit still counts as profit with regards to IP.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[goose-incarnated]

Not that it's entirely relevant, but indirect profit still counts as profit with regards to IP.

True, but what is relevant is that the judge pointed out that Oracle hadn't submitted any evidence of profits, hence as far as the court is concerned, there are no profits. The court is not obliged to plead any parties case for them, the parties are obliged to submit evidence and it a party refuses to submit any evidence then it's not up to the court to find that evidence.

Re:Oracle can go after infringers profits, but..

[Sun]

Slight correction.

Oracle did submit such proof. Google had it stricken. Oracle got a second chance, with instructions what they need to fix. They submitted a second report, but ignored the instructions. That got stricken too. Despite earlier claim by the Judge to the contrary, Oracle got a third chance. They ignored the instructions, yet again. All relevant parts were stricken. That is why Oracle does not have any evidence of profits.

Shachar

What are the 9 lines?

[adisakp]

Can someone post the 9 infringing lines of code here for us to see?

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

From OpenJDK:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

                if (fromIndex > toIndex)

                        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                              ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

        }

From Google:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

                if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                              ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

                if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

        }

}

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[adisakp]

Wait - is this it???

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

taken from https://plus.google.com/115445134403759043734/posts/9QCzzR2rALX

From OpenJDK and Dalvik:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

if (fromIndex > toIndex)

throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

if (fromIndex arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

}

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[dmesg0]

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
        if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                      ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
        if (fromIndex arrayLen)
                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

Hopefully Oracle won't sue me for this...

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[DarthBling]

Shamelessly stolen from Githaron's post

http://notavailablein.ca/2012/05/googles-infringement-against-oracle-9-lines-of-code/

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
    if (fromIndex > toIndex)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                  ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
    if (fromIndex < 0)
        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
    if (toIndex > arrayLen)
        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[dmesg0]

Hmm, slashdot doesn't won't infringing code to be posted, it removed a few lines during posting.
Here's the original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951480

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[dmesg0]

s/won't/want/

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[DeadCatX2]

No, they won't sue you because /. ate your <

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[demonbug]

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

        if (fromIndex > toIndex)

                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +

                                      ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

        if (fromIndex arrayLen)

                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

Hopefully Oracle won't sue me for this...

Oh great, now you owe Oracle 6 billion karma. Nothing but Larry Ellison PR bits on Slashdot from here on out.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[pr0fessor]

isn't it supposed to be rangeCheck() but that's not nine lines so... not sure.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Kalriath]

It's the < that Slashdot ate (plus a pile of stuff after). And actually it was the browser that did it, Slashdot just outputs your HTML verbatim.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot swallowed the stuff between < and > probably because you used "plain old text" (which surprise surprise isn't plain old text). You should use "Extrans" instead.

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
        if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                      ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
        if (fromIndex < 0)
                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
        if (toIndex > arrayLen)
                throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[TheLink]

No. Slashdot ate it. Not the browser. Go use "view source" or equivalent to check. The stuff between is gone.

If Slashdot just outputs HTML verbatim this site would be full of XSS and other attacks.

Try posting <b>. If it really was verbatim, stuff would be bold after that.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Locke2005]

As a programmer, all I can say is: if I had to write this function from scratch, it would take me less than 2 minutes total and it would look EXACTLY the same.

Re:What are the 9 lines?

[Anonymous Coward]

"if (fromIndex arrayLen)"

Has the java syntax included some new shorthand I'm missing or is /. eating characters?

Obviousness

[markkezner]

I presume the 9 lines in question refer to TimSort.rangeCheck().

Have you ever looked at it? If I had to implement that method, I probably would have done it the exact same way.

Re:Obviousness

[R3d M3rcury]

private static void checkRange(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex)
{
            if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                    throw new InvalidArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                                          ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
            if (toIndex > arrayLen)
                    throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
            if (fromIndex < 0)
                    throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
}

See? Now it's completely different!

Random aside: Is it just me, or is this going to fail if toIndex == arrayLen? If the array has 100 items, array[100] = 0 will be bad but rangeCheck(100, 17, 100) will not throw an exception.

Or am I missing something? I don't know Java...

Re:Obviousness

[Anonymous Coward]

Random aside: Is it just me, or is this going to fail if toIndex == arrayLen? If the array has 100 items, array[100] = 0 will be bad but rangeCheck(100, 17, 100) will not throw an exception.

Or am I missing something? I don't know Java...

Obviously it's a [from,to)-style range.

Re:Obviousness

[Anonymous Coward]

The comments clear it up:

/**
  * Checks that fromIndex and toIndex are in range, and throws an
  * appropriate exception if they aren't.
  *
  * @param arrayLen the length of the array
  * @param fromIndex the index of the first element of the range
  * @param toIndex the index after the last element of the range
  * @throws IllegalArgumentException if fromIndex > toIndex
  * @throws ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException if fromIndex arrayLen
  */

Still a little confusing, since I think most would assume toIndex is the last index, rather than the one after.

Re:Obviousness

[mrbester]

If I had to implement that method I'd have checked that the highest index of a zero based array is length - 1 for my third comparison...

Re:Obviousness

[markkezner]

What's amusing is that the 9 lines in question don't even implement the algorithm; they perform a quick sanity check before the real computation starts. Is this really the best they have? Couldn't they have found more creative lines of code to be infringing on a copyright?

Anyway I've been looking some stuff up. TimSort was originally written into Python by Tim Peters in 2002 (BSD-style license). If I'm not mistaken, that would mean that Sun wrote a trivial check as part their own re-implementation of someone else's work, and are claiming massive copyright damages on it. If Oracle wins that, that's one hell of a precedent.

Re:Obviousness

[shutdown -p now]

I'd put spaces around the fourth plus sign in it, though.

Re:Obviousness

[nedlohs]

The range is [fromIndex, toIndex), so the end of the range is exclusive and hence checkRange(100, 17, 100) is supposed to be valid.

Of course you would expect that to be documented in checkRange rather than having to look at all the callers and seeing how they use it, but apparently no one bothered. Which makes that it was copied pretty clear cut, I would hope two people couldn't be that silly.

Re:Obviousness

[zippthorne]

In Java, do arrays start with 0 or 1?

Re:Obviousness

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that too. That's completely insane.

Re:Obviousness

[styrotech]

I could have misremembered this, but it gets worse than that:

I was under the impression that it was actually Google/Android engineers that ported Timsort to Java and contributed it upstream.

Re:Obviousness

[R3d M3rcury]

I assume they start at 0, since the code is also checking to see if fromIndex < 0. So either the code is wrong on one end or the other, but for all I know about Java, indexes could start at zero and go up to the number given...

Re:Obviousness

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

anything even remotely serious will have zero-based arrays; java falls under the 'serious' category (perhaps too serious, but i'm a dynamic type of guy)

Re:Obviousness

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had to implement that method, I probably would have done it the exact same way.

I sense an expensive lawsuit in your future.

Re:Obviousness

[Anonymous Coward]

Java starts arrays at index 0.

Re:Obviousness

[dkf]

anything even remotely serious will have zero-based arrays; java falls under the 'serious' category

That's very much not true (the classic counterexample being Fortran, which is definitely a serious language) but Java nonetheless has zero-based indexes.

Re:Obviousness

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

nice to know, my gf uses fortran for modelling so i know it's serious but i would have bet much it was 0-based. can you help a bit more, and give me your opinion as to why 1-based languages make any sense, at all? I know it's a simple policy choice, but it makes as much sense as starting at the letter 'b' (with the 'a' at the end, not omitted) when reciting the alphabet. I consider myself above average in programming and can't see it; what value does it give that the lack of standardization doesn't take away? (pre)Thanks!---

Re:Obviousness

[markkezner]

Wow, you're right, that's completely insane. Look at the revision history of TimSort.

How can Oracle claim copyright damages on a file in Java's source code that is Copyrighted in 2009 by Google?
Why hasn't Google tried to nullify the copyright claim on this file on the grounds they they wrote the code and that they themselves own the copyright?
Why would Oracle make an issue of this file if the case for infringement is so weak?

None of this makes any sense to me whatsoever. I feel like I'm missing something; Oracle can't be this outrageous and Google's lawyers can't be this dumb. Can someone clarify?

Re:Obviousness

[markkezner]

Okay, so TimSort.rangeCheck() was allegedly copied from java.util.Arrays.

Aside from the obviousness issues, this fact would make it slightly more sensible to use rangeCheck() for a copyright infringement case, except for the fact that java.util.Arrays was provided by Sun under the GPL v2. The GPL was written to encourage copying and modification.

The worst I could say about Google allegedly copying this code is that they re-licensed the GPL rangeCheck() method to Apache 2.0, which you can't really do; the combination of GPL code and non-GPL code would be a GPL end product. Regardless, I still don't see a billion dollar damage claim.

The next value will be...

[luizd]

See! it is obvious!

1) $ 6100000000 = 6,1e9
2) $ 2800000 = 2,8e6
3) $ 150000 = 1,5e5
4) ???

base series: 6.1, 2.8, 1.5... 0.91!
power series: 9, 6, 5... 4!
So: 0.91e4 or 9.1e3 or $ 9100

If I were Oracle, I'll be happy with the $ 150.000 offer.

Can we say Eidetic memory

[niftymitch]

From WP:
"Eidetic memory ( /adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory,
is a medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds, or
objects in memory with extreme precision and in abundant volume."

I would assert(tm) that the class of programmers a company like Google hires
would have Eidetic memory to one degree or another. Fundamental patterns
would stick and be used little different that humming a tune in the shower.

"Double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble... " I would further
assert(R) that despite the geekish bent of this community a very large number
could continue for nine line and perhaps a lot more.

If nine lines is worth billions then programming is in trouble as a profession
except for those that live like mushrooms.

AND most importantly these qualities could hold an individual hostage to the
point that an employer that wishes to enforce copyright must continue to
pay these employees full and fair for the reasonable legal length of such copyrights
if they wish to enforce such limitations to this degree.

Watching this is fun.

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Oracle has a history of going after smaller companies, (Ask me how I know.) and threatening litigation. Smaller companies usually fold, and just pay out. It is cheaper than court. I love that they have decided to go after someone who can afford to say "Let's let the courts decide."

Re:Watching this is fun.

[techsimian]

So what you are saying is: Larry tried the "my balls your chin" line on a wood chipper. The wood chipper in this case is Google.

But Oracle said...

[inode_buddha]

But Oracle said this isn't about money! In court no less!

Re:But Oracle said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible? Such a company cannot go to court unless it is deemed profitable to do so; the CEO could be in real trouble otherwise.

Re:But Oracle said...

[Some Bitch]

Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible?

They're legally bound to run the business in line with the articles of association.

Re:But Oracle said...

[dkf]

Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible? Such a company cannot go to court unless it is deemed profitable to do so; the CEO could be in real trouble otherwise.

That's an oversimplification of the fiduciary responsibility rules. While yes, a company (and its board) should seek to generate plenty of profits, it doesn't have to use a monotonically-increasing measure; it can use something that will take some time to pay off and it can take risks (indeed, handling complex risks is pretty much the whole point of having companies at all). What's more, it's really hard to bring a court case just on the basis that the board made a mistake; the main recourse that shareholders have is really just to elect a new board.

Where fiduciary responsibility really kicks in is when there is a clear financial responsibility and the option to act directly against it. The classic example is where the company (or some part of it) has been put up for sale; at that point, the board has to advertise properly and take the best offer available. FR means that the chairman can't just sell at a knock-down price to a golfing buddy. FR means that the board has to act in the interests of the owners, not against them, but it doesn't mean that the board is forced to always act in a formally-predictable way.

Of course, some on Wall Street would like FR to mean that the company should always seek to increase the value of its stock over any measured time period — after all, that would make it so much easier for the traders to make their targets and get their fat bonuses made fatter — but that really just shows how dysfunctional Wall St really is...

Re:But Oracle said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't "CEO" be the same Larry Ellison that knowingly and willfully slept with his personal secretary, knowing full well he would likely get sued for sexual harassment as soon as he broke off the relationship and fired her? Obviously THAT CEO doesn't have much to fear from the shareholders...

Re:AC's

[TaoPhoenix]

I'll politely disagree -

It's the flood of new accounts posting long sculpted messages on FP and the next 80 of us *are too lazy even to change the topic heading*. They're all signed in. Someone might even be spotting them $50 to get the Paid User preview of future stories so they can craft their long FP's.

Everyone keeps saying "bonch" but that feels to me more like a triple confusion of Set Theory. We definitely have shills now, more this year than any other year. But it's not clear that it's "one user", the next step is "one firm", but I can't believe that exactly one shill firm is ruling the waters - so I bet there's even 3-7 of them going on.

The AC's don't tend to post 12 line FP's with a message.

Re:cower and all that

[TaoPhoenix]

The first step to passing a Turing Test is finding a sufficiently programmable meme. I bet any 50 of you here could build chat bots better than some ten certain memes of which he is one. Seen those posts like :

"you orange must div in the muslim death but becaus yo how babby mrdured?"

Who is possibly posting those and why?

Oracle statutory damages demands?

[Anonymous Coward]

As calculated by Hollywood accountants right?

9 lines

[martin-boundary]

In the beginning there was the word.

Then God ran out of money, and sold off the word to Oracle.

"May 12, 2012. In a highly controversial Ohio court filing today, Oracle Corp. demanded damages of 6 quintillion dollars for the unauthorized use of derived literary works, including the sun, sea and sky, and fishes, animals and rocks dated from about 6000 years ago. A tiny chosen sample of humans is also expected to be sold off to the highest bidder to pay for initial court expenses."

Re:AC's

[inode_buddha]

shit, I wish I could give you an "insightful" for that... Notice in this story how its bumped the whole discussion about Oracle down to the level that very few will really read it?

Bad Summary

[dlsmith]

The larger figures quoted ($6.1 billion) refer to the estimated total for all infringement claims. The $150,000 discussed today is for one claim. Of course, the whole case doesn't revolve around the nine lines of code. The big (unresolved) questions are about copyright of the APIs and infringement of patents.

Lots of works vs. one work

[DragonWriter]

When the RIAA sues, typically they sue over a large number of different copyright protected works; with up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work without proof of actual damages or infringers profits, they are able to rack up large statutory damage awards this way.

In the charge at issue here, Oracle has gotten a verdict on Google infringing a single work for which they have provided no evidence of actual damages or infringers profits. With up to $150,000 in statutory damages available per work, that gives them $150,000 in statutory damages available.

Its worth noting that the judge isn't informing Oracle that their damages are minimal. He has informed Oracle that they didn't bother presenting evidence on damages or infringers profits from the infringement of the work at issue, and since they didn't do that, there is no evidence in the case on which to find anything other than statutory damages.

The difference here is not a problem with the court system (I'm not saying that the court system does not, in many ways, favor the wealthier litigant, but the difference in the damages available in the two kinds of cases at issue in this subthread isn't actually that kind of issue.)

If there is a problem, its with the way copyright statutory damages work (either in being too generous in the kinds of cases the RIAA brings or being too stingy in the kind of case Oracle has brought.) But its not the the people targetted by the RIAA have succeeded less well in cases where the facts at issue were parallel to those in Oracle v. Google, its that the legal rules provide larger awards without proof of actual damages when lots of works are at issue than when fewer works are at issue.

Re:Lots of works vs. one work

[Anonymous Coward]

Its worth noting that the judge isn't informing Oracle that their damages are minimal. He has informed Oracle that they didn't bother presenting evidence on damages or infringers profits from the infringement of the work at issue, and since they didn't do that, there is no evidence in the case on which to find anything other than statutory damages.

Ahh, but there's 17 USC 504(b) to consider (emphasis mine)

(b) Actual Damages and Profits. â" The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.

Taken at face value, this means if Google infringed even a single line of code (let alone 9), Oracle is entitled to ALL of Google's gross revenue unless Google proves that each dollar was either
1) Used for expenses or
2) Attributable to some factor other than the infringed work

And you probably thought statutory damages were the most unjust part of copyright law.... turns out actual damages are even worse.

Unfortunately for Oracle, Google probably has armies of lawyers and accountants who can do the proving. Probably it will cost Google more than $150,000 just to do so.

Re:Lots of works vs. one work

[DragonWriter]

Taken at face value, this means if Google infringed even a single line of code (let alone 9), Oracle is entitled to ALL of Google's gross revenue unless Google proves that each dollar was either
1) Used for expenses or
2) Attributable to some factor other than the infringed work

And you probably thought statutory damages were the most unjust part of copyright law.... turns out actual damages are even worse.

Two things:

First, what you are actually pointing to as "worse" is the infringer's profits that are available in addition to actual damages, not the actual damages themselves.

Second -- and more importantly -- your reading of Section 504(b) conflicts with the 9th Circuit precedent that is binding on the trial court here. See, among other cases, Polar Bear Productions v. Timex, 384 F.3d 700 (2004):

Section 504(b) sets forth the evidentiary burdens for recovery of profits: "The copyright owner is entitled to recover ... any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement.... In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work." 17 U.S.C. [Section] 504(b). Thus, [Section] 504(b) creates a two-step framework for recovery of indirect profits: 1) the copyright claimant must first show a causal nexus between the infringement and the gross revenue; and 2) once the causal nexus is shown, the infringer bears the burden of apportioning the profits that were not the result of infringement.

(BTW, Slashdot's failure to handle many HTML entities in comments -- like &sect; -- is annoying.)

The one fundamental doctrine for all IP law

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions

This is the direction in which our entire IP system must inevitably move.

If some piece of IP costs $6 billion to develop (using fair accounting), then it should receive $6 billion worth of protection.

The development of 9 lines of code has a marginal cost of a few hundred dollars at most. Therefore, it should receive a corresponding amount of protection.

This is the only approach that feels fair and sensible to most people.

All of the most egregious problems in IP law occur when this one simple rule is violated:

"The protection must be proportional to the investment."

That one simple rule must ultimately become the fundamental doctrine upon which our entire IP system is based.

Until then, we will suffer with continual strife.

Re:AC's

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Someone might even be spotting them $50 to get the Paid User preview of future stories so they can craft their long FP's.

... or they can just be looking at the stories in the firehose moderation queue and seeing the ones that are the highest-modded.

Or even just getting lucky and getting a first post - I've gotten 2 in the last 2 days without even trying ... just luck.

Dear Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Oracle,

I thought we were friends, partners, but lately you've just been all about the money... and getting all bully-boy about it just isn't my style.

It's the end, I don't want to see you any more, you're just not the kind of guy for me any more.

This is goodbye...

Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

WHAT THE WHAT?!

The original author wrote the same utility function twice for two different projects, and this is against the law? How is this even an issue?

I'm befuddled.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[MonsterTrimble]

Because stupid amounts of money have gotten involved.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Jesus_666]

He wrote it for Sun/Oracle while working for Sun/Oracle, hence the copyright lies with Sun/Oracle. The fact that he wrote the lines doesn't change the fact that he doesn't own the copyright.

Things would be different if his employment contract with Sun/Oracle had said "All code produced by the employee is property of the employee and the employer merely gains a perpetual license to use and redistribute them" or if he had made a special deal about rangeCheck() to that effect. But that's highly unlikely.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

While I can see an entire program or file being given copyright which are creative in nature, it seems unreasonable that Sun/Oracle could own a copyright on a 9-line utilitarian rangeCheck function that could never be written the same way again by anyone including the original author. Was he supposed to name the variables something different? How is a programmer even supposed to remember what code they've written over the years? Chances are for a utility function, you would name things in your current convention and syntax for the language, leverage what you've learned over the years, and probably write it the exact same way.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Cardcaptor_RLH85]

I understand the entire copyright thing but how the HELL is a software engineer supposed to remember every line of code that he's ever written? If he later goes to work at a different company and re-writes the same lines for a relatively simple function like this one what happens? Can it always end like this with a lawsuit? It just feels to me that it's a waste of time to go to court over a few lines of, potentially copied, code written by one man twice.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were a carpenter/builder and made yourself tools while working for an employer, do you get to keep those tools when you leave? Probably not if they were made with the employer's dime and time.

On the other hand if you brought the tools in, you should get to leave with them. Problem is some IT companies have employment contracts that effectively allow them to take ownership of those tools as well!

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Jesus_666]

I think that copyright isn't designed to handle cases like this. That's a real issue, especially when we're talking about trivial code like that. Perhaps copyright needs a lower bar; some point where you can say: "This is too trivial to be covered." Of course we'd need to find a reasonable definition for what's copyrightable in terms of code and we'd need to get big media to agree, at least as far as US copyright is concerned.

This is a topic where badly-planned rules could end up doing more harm than good and I can't come up with anything reasonable right now. Anyone?

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, if you built yourself new tools that just happened to be the same as the ones you used to have, who would find fault?

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anthony Mouse]

He wrote it for Sun/Oracle while working for Sun/Oracle, hence the copyright lies with Sun/Oracle.

Lies. This is from Groklaw's coverage of his testimony:

Q. You left Sun and joined Google in 2004. What did you do at Google?
A. I ported existing Google infrastructure that was primarily accessible from C++ so that it was accessible to Java. I joined the Android team in December 2008 or January 2009. Android had already been released, and phones were in the market.

...

Q. Do you know of the existence of other rangecheck() functions?
A. Yes, there's one in arrays.java. I wrote it. [Timsort: from Tim Peters, and originally in Python. The Java implementation was a port.]
Q. Where did you get the Python version of Timsort? Was it open source [this was 2007, pre-Android]?
A. Yes, Guido [van Rossum] pointed me to it, it's under a permissive open-source license.
Q. What did you want to do with your Java Timsort?
A. Put it into OpenJDK (an open implentation of the SE platform).
Q. Who controlled OpenJDK?
A. Sun.
Q. How does someone contribute to OpenJDK, and had you done it before?
A. Yes. [Discussion about source repositories, and Doug Lee at Oswego, NY].
Q. If you worked for Google, why would you contribute to Sun's JDK?
A. Java is important to me; it's given me a lot.
Q. Why did you use the same rangecheck() function in Timsort as was in arrays.java?
A. It's good software engineering to reuse an existing function.
Q. But why use the exact same code?
A. I copied rangecheck() as a temporary measure, assuming this would be merged into arrays.java and my version of rangecheck() would go away.
[Discussion of Timsort dates and Android work dates.]
Q. Was Timsort accepted and added into OpenJDK?
A. Yes.

In other words, a Google engineer, working at Google, wrote a function and contributed it to Java (for free). Now Oracle is trying to sue over it because of that copyright assignment, and claiming that the freely contributed code is hugely valuable and that the contributor therefore owes them big money for using it. Even if this is technically legal for them to sue over, Oracle really deserves to DIAF over this.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[sco08y]

WHAT THE WHAT?!

The original author wrote the same utility function twice for two different projects, and this is against the law? How is this even an issue?

I'm befuddled.

Because you signed a contract stating you wouldn't.

And in this case, it looks like Oracle will get a trivial sum because you did, trivially, break the law.

Is it illegal to wander across the street haphazardly? Sure. Is it a terrible offense? No, it's called jaywalking, and you might get a small fine for doing so. And it makes sense to discourage people from wandering into oncoming traffic.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

Yes, you get to keep your memory, your experience. You get to keep what you learned. Because everything you have learned, is what your current and future employer benefits from. That's what they're paying you for. If I knew how to write a LeftTrim() 5 years ago, and I need to write a LeftTrim today, I'm going to leverage my gained experience to write it again.

Small utilitarian methods should not fall under copyright because they are not creative expressions on their own.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

Nonsense. Our past experience is what they hired us for. What we know, what we've learned, is an asset they're paying us for. No one could do their jobs if they couldn't leverage what they've learned in past for the future.

But more importantly, copyright covers the larger creative expression as a whole. A small utility method is like a musical note A. You can copyright a software program and you can copyright a song because they represent a larger creative expression, but it is absurd to say copyright covers a note or a beat or a small utility method.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

How would the employer feel if your project called for a LeftTrim method and you said sorry boss, can't do my job because this other project I worked on 5 years ago also used a LeftTrim method and I don't want to break the law, I don't even want to risk it?

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[jmactacular]

That hypothetical would be crazy, software development would grind to a halt.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes, even our own.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Hognoxious]

Someone with better musical knowledge might correct me, but even if we take smallish sequences of notes only a tiny fraction of the mathematically huge number of possibilities sound right.

So sometimes there's an extremely limited number of way a certain thing could be done, without going out of your way to be different just for the sake of it.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think copyright should involve some creative element. When it comes to computer code it is hard to define what is purely functional and where some creativity comes into play, but it should be clear that those 9 lines of code are purely functional and require no creativity.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Oracle thought the copyright infringement was much greater than this (look at what they claimed for), but when it got to the point when these 9 lines were all that was left they couldn't back down (I'm sure Ellison's ego wouldn't allow it) and had to run with what they've got. And don't forgot ORACLE's full name: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

Re:Plagiarizing Yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste of time? This is extremely profitable way to get government to block competition. It certainly is abhorrent to most of us, but when has protectionism ever been different?

Steganography

[zippthorne]

They're the new numbers broadcasts. Bob takes a short secret message, compresses and encrypts it, then feeds it through a language generator, or word picker. You can get the bits/word up by adding deliberate misspellings.

At the other end, Alice feeds the sentence through the reverse word picker, then decrypts and uncompresses the message.

If they were wise, they'd make a gramatically correct sentence generator - the whole point is to avoid attracting the attention of eve, so she never even tries to intercept the message.

Re:AC's

[hairyfeet]

Exactly FPs don't mean shit, I've probably gotten a dozen in the past 2 years without even trying, just happened on a story that had something I wanted to talk about and got first totally by accident.

But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT is what I'm talking about. We USED to have some pretty interesting arguments over here on various subjects, everything from quantum theories to NTFS VS EXT 3 to what differences a compiler can make on code, quite interesting stuff.

But for those to happen there needs to be a flow and all the AC nigger faggot shill troll crap just turns everything into a flamewar and ruins any chance of a conversation. Now i find myself lurking more and more on other sites, which I shall not name because last time I did i had a FOSSie follow me around for half a year just so they could post "die you fat fucker die" over and over, simply because at those other sites, even when we disagree, there is a conversation on the topic at hand. Just the other day we had a nice one about "at which point does a feature in an OS cease to become helpful but instead becomes bling and fluff"? some believed that it should be judged by the majority, others believed that it didn't matter as long as there was SOME way to turn it off, and a few agreed with me that when it hampers the user or slows down their task it ceases to be helpful.

I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise. You had everything from the little PC shop guys like me to a nice fellow from CERN who was nice enough to explain in layman's terms what the finding of new particles would do to our understanding of physics and its real world value.

But the only way we are gonna have those kinds of conversations again is either everyone ignores the nigger faggot trolls or the system does something about them. Now considering how this Oracle article was so quickly derailed by a single AC I'd argue that we need the system to help in this regard. While my ideas are only a start and i'm sure others can think of more and better ways i think one thing we can ALL agree on is these flow breaking posts that spam this site frankly need to go.

Who hates Java now

[Anonymous Coward]

Might sound silly, but deep inside I have this something that somehow does not make me feel so good anymore to develop in Java. Of course you cannot drop company projects or let's say your MQ broker or Glassfish/Jboss/Tomcat/whatever else with all their deployed apps.

It just makes me think, that my personal/fun projects should be written in something else that does not have shitty news around them and do not really belong to anyone. (C - any flavor with any topping, Python, Perl, whatever fits the purpose ...)

Copyright and theft

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

When you write a novel you own the copyright to the entire work. Even large portions of it can not be copied without your consent. But if you start extorting people for copying "I am", the original language construct you invented, then you, the copyright owner, are stealing. There are limits.

Re:Copyright and theft

[the_B0fh]

What makes you think the person who wrote that code is the copyright owner?

backward vs. forward looking?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Google is found guilty of copyright infringement and/or patent infringement, then it is backward looking to focus on the amount of money that Oracle may win in damages and it is forward looking to focus on a permanent injunction barring Google from continuin to exploit Oracle's copyrights and/or patents without first obtaining licenses.

To be sure, Oracle is forward looking.

Which way are you looking?

Re:AC's

[IrrepressibleMonkey]

Is this some sort of meta-humour that I don't understand? Or are you actually comfortable with using the phrase "nigger faggot trolls" to make your point? You've been modded up, so I hope I'm missing something.

Re:AC's

[drinkypoo]

But notice how the nigger faggot shill troll AC posts have already blown the flow to hell so that it isn't even about oracle now? THAT

No, actually, I haven't noticed that. But then, I have figured out how to use the comment score modifier system.

I really miss having those kinds of conversations here because at least once upon a time we had some pretty bright folks here with many different areas of expertise.

A lot of them are still here. Sometimes they post anonymously, for reasons you describe.

IMO the only way to fix the problems with this site are as follows, pretty simple plan. 1, eliminate anonymous posting, it's not that hard to get a slashdot ID. 2, don't allow posting from a new ID for a week. 3, unfuck moderation. A moderation system which does not permit you to comment and moderate the same conversation is designed to guarantee mediocrity by ensuring that the people most qualified to moderate, who are also the people most qualifed to comment, only do one or the other. That's why we have metamoderation. Penalize them harder for bad mods if the mod is near their comment, and/or deny moderation of comments beneath their comments in a thread. But Slashdot doesn't WANT to fix moderation; the current moderation system is working fine for the purpose of attracting eyeballs to ad impressions, which is what this site is for today.

Re:AC's

[Barbara, not Barbie]

This FP was supposed to be a "second post", not a first post, to make a point. I waited a bit before hitting submit, but ... which just goes to show that "getting a FP" doesn't require some sort of conspiracy.

last time I did i had a FOSSie follow me around for half a year

I've had a few of those - in the end, they just discredit themselves, same as every time APK or Michael Kristopeit or whoever sees an anonymous comment someone posted against them and thinks it's me they go all nuts for a day, a week or even a month. My reaction? I couldn't care less. Or, I could care less, but I'd really have to work at it. They're just amateurs when it comes to "l'art de la trollerie". More of a threat to themselves than to anyone else.

either everyone ignores the nigger faggot trolls or the system does something about them

Most of the people already ignore the posters attacking blacks and LGBTtQq, and the recent spate of "these accounts are paid shills controlled by blah-blah-blah", while they were different enough to be amusing at first, are getting boring (esp. since at least one of the accounts listed is pretty obviously not a paid shill to anyone who's been around for a while, so really, who cares ... :-)

Ultimately, they just discredit themselves, same as RMS did with the larger public when he made his asinine "Dead Steve Jobs" remarks. Maybe he was suffering from "footcheese-in-mouth" disease ... Same as for Oracle, Ellison has pretty much discredited himself with his failed acquisition of Sun, because it really IS a fail.

Ultimately, this will prove to be a "Steve Ballmer Moment" for both Oracle and Ellison. Just another stupid decision that quickly gets forgotten as long as the profits keep rolling in.

Larry cant code, so hes a dick

[cheekyboy]

Can larry code from Oracle?

If he could, then he might see how crap his company is.

hehehhe

Re:cower and all that

[Hognoxious]

The first step to passing a Turing Test is finding a sufficiently programmable meme.

In Soviet Russia, meme programs you!!

DeVry doing MBAs now?

[Hognoxious]

Being an American corporation, aren't Oracle legally bound to making as much money as possible?

Use your preferred search engine and see if you can find such a law. Alternatively, find a company that has made charitable donations where the officers have been prosecuted for it.

Such a company cannot go to court unless it is deemed profitable to do so; the CEO could be in real trouble otherwise.

One slight problem: knowing in advance what the result will be. That would apply to lots of other things too - launching a new product, open (or closing) a factory.

OP is a bit confused

[Anonymous Coward]

The original poster is a bit confused by this. The 9 line is applies to Oracle's copywrite portion of the lawsuit. Nothing has been decided on the patient argument which goes to trial next.

Re:AC's

[hairyfeet]

Normally i don't respond after the first day but since you seem to be confused and have missed the previous post I will explain. if you have ever played DM in a game that allows chat you quickly find that there are trolls that love to spam the words nigger and faggot to the point of absurdity. It doesn't matter what is going on in game, or what is done or isn't, because no matter what you WILL hear constant strings of profanity with either of those two words or both in the sentence.

Since you missed the earlier post I was using this behavior as a metaphor with what we are currently seeing on Slashdot, where it doesn't matter what the topic is, whether the person is upmodded or down, because within the first 5 post you WILL get the /. equivalent of those DM players with their "nigger faggot" garbage only in the case of /. it is the "shill astroturfer' posts which just break the flow and will derail the conversation just as having some 14 year old screaming "you damned nigger faggot!" can break the gameflow and ruin what was otherwise an enjoyable afternoon of game play.

So i hope that clears things up, its not a slur against any race or sexual preference but just an easy to understand (at least for those of us who DM) metaphor for derailing something with pointless insults. Lets face it, considering how damned obvious corporate paid shills and astroturfers are, with their using key talking points like "synergy' or "vertical integration" or other marketing drone buzzwords there really is NO point in the constant screaming of those words yet in article after article that is EXACTLY what one gets here now. Frankly its no wonder readership is going down because again to use a game analogy its like those MP games that do nothing to discourage wall hacks or aimbots, the BS quickly reaches a point most would rather be elsewhere than deal with the shit.