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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.
that lawyers would ignore the advice of the judge and pursue ridiculous sums of money with no basis.
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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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.
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.
The Admin and the Engineer
I'm thinking that $9 (one dollar for each copied line) sounds like a nice number. :)
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not only that but the function is so simple that it could have been a complete accident.
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.
The rich have pretty close to 100% control over political office and media access. I don't really see the point in differentiating.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Can someone post the 9 infringing lines of code here for us to see?
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.)
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.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
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.
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.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
From WP: /adtk/), commonly referred to as photographic memory,
"Eidetic 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.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
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."
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Because after the exception is thrown we magically just move on to the next if?
But Oracle said this isn't about money! In court no less!
C|N>K
Those checks aren't run because an exception is thrown before that.
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"
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
MOD THE CHILD UP!
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."
Yes, because there's so many powerful poor people and so many powerless rich people.
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.
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.
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 ...
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Because stupid amounts of money have gotten involved.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
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?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
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.
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.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?