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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
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.
I'm thinking that $9 (one dollar for each copied line) sounds like a nice number. :)
Clearly, if Google had not developed Android, Oracle would have been able to market its own smartphone/tablet OS using Java, right?
Palm trees and 8
Not only that but the function is so simple that it could have been a complete accident.
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...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.