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No Patent Infringement Found In Oracle vs. Google
sl4shd0rk writes "Today, the jury in the Oracle vs. Google trial found no infringement of patents by Google. The jury deliberated about 30 minutes to reach the verdict, bringing an end to the second phase of the trial, and a beginning to the damage phase, which may be very little of what Oracle originally asked for. Still no word on API copyright issues. Judge Alsup will be ruling on that in the near future, and it will certainly have an impact on the developer community."
It doesn't matter anyway. There were only nine lines of copied code and the only reason it was there is because the guy that submitted it originally to openJDK is the same guy that put it in Android. The judge learned java for this trial and even he said he could have wrote rangeCheck in a few minutes and had even done so accidentally many times.
Suck it, Oracle. You lose. Good day, sir!
If you recall, 2-3 weeks ago the jury ruled that Google had violated Oracle's copyrights on the Java API's. The caveat being that it is not established in US law whether or not API's are protected by copyright. The judge instructed the jury to deliberate as is API's are protected by copyright. Now, we are just waiting on the judge's ruling as to whether or not API's are protected by copyright. If he rules that they are not, which I personally expect will be the ruling, then the jury's ruling on the API copyright issue will be moot. This was the copyright issue mentioned in the article, not the rangeCheck code, which is apparently a non-issue.
Sadly, this spin has already been played over and over by the media. Somehow, a loss for Oracle in court is always deemed a "partial victory".. if you read the right articles.
I'd recommend that you spend some time on Groklaw and read reviews by legal people on what these rulings really mean. While Groklaw is pro-opensource, their articles are pretty straight views of our legal system. Enough commentary is covered by people (many of which are Lawyers) to fill in gaps, and of course "can" be more biased.
Many of these same magazines claimed that SCO was going to prevail over IBM, and every loss was a "Partial Victory". Groklaw was dead on, though it took a very long time for the courts to finally get things sorted out.
Oh, and if you look back further many of these same magazines claimed that Microsoft had countless "partial victories" in the EU anti-trust case, the Iowa anti-trust case, and the US DOJ anti-trust case. See any trends you may wish to not follow?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That depends on whether they assigned the copyright along with the submission. If they had already assigned the copyright to Sun (as I believe was required to have it accepted), then they would no longer have the right to submit it anywhere else. Such is the stupid world we live in, which is why I can easily believe that a developer would have forgotten they did it, especially on such a trivial function.
Your point is well taken, so I did some checking. openJDK submissions require that you accept the "Oracle Contributor Agreement" [nee Sun]. From that document:
2. With respect to any worldwide copyrights, or copyright applications and registrations, in your contribution:
- you hereby assign to us joint ownership, and to the extent that such assignment is or becomes invalid, ineffective or unenforceable, you hereby grant to us a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide, no-charge, royalty-free, unrestricted license to exercise all rights under those copyrights. This includes, at our option, the right to sublicense these same rights to third parties through multiple levels of sublicensees or other licensing arrangements;
- you agree that each of us can do all things in relation to your contribution as if each of us were the sole owners, and if one of us makes a derivative work of your contribution, the one who makes the derivative work (or has it made) will be the sole owner of that derivative work;
- you agree that you will not assert any moral rights in your contribution against us, our licensees or transferees;
- you agree that we may register a copyright in your contribution and exercise all ownership rights associated with it; and
- you agree that neither of us has any duty to consult with, obtain the consent of, pay or render an accounting to the other for any use or distribution of your contribution.
The first two clauses appear to cover it. The joint ownership clause seems mostly concerned that any submission grants rights to Sun/Oracle to use the code. But, the original submitter retains parallel rights [as long as they don't try to revoke Oracle's right]. The derivative work clause implies that either party may make a derivative work without consulting the other and gets full rights to the new work.
Thus, giving the rangeCheck function to Android is allowed by this agreement under either of these two clauses.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there