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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. :)
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
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
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);
}
}
Wait - is this it???
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.
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
No, they won't sue you because /. ate your <
:(){
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.
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.
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!
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'
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.
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.
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.