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."

Comments

Does this mean Java really is free?

[jonniesmokes]

If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?

Re:Does this mean Java really is free?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?

It's a great deal more important than that: If APIs are copyrightable, API-compatible implementations of anything without that thing's blessing would be on legally shaky ground. I'll leave imagining the technology world in an alternate universe where IBM simply sued Compaq for producing an API-compatible BIOS to the reader; but that's the sort of magnitude we are talking here...

Re:Does this mean Java really is free?

[characterZer0]

If they are copyrightable, will we all have to switch to Scala running on the JVM?

If the APIs are copyrightable, the bytecode spec will also be copyrightable. So you cannot write a JVM without Oracle's permission. This was the problem for Apache Harmony. If APIs are found to be non-copyrightable but the bytecode spec still is for some reason, Google could write (or allow others to write) a Dalvik VM for other platforms and we could continue writing Java code but compile it for the DVM instead of the JVM.

Summary slightly wrong

[ZombieBraintrust]

There will be no damage phase. Judge has sent the jury home. Judge will handle damages himself based on agreements between Oracle and Google. Basically Oracle will get a few thousand for the 9 lines of code and a couple thousand for the test files. Then they will spend that money in one day in lawyer fees on the appeal. It is also important to note that this trial only covered 2 patents. Oracle can try again with different patents. However it should be noted that these were likely their best patents to use against Google.

Re:Didn't take long, did it?

[X0563511]

History/Karma's a bitch, huh. one troll example .

How is that a troll? It looks like a perfectly reasonable, logical, opinion. (note: we are allowed to have differing opinions, and "troll" does not mean "does not share my opinion")

Re:Didn't take long, did it?

[LordLucless]

It was the standard "I hate microsoft , but....(opposite argument)" troll

I believe what you call a troll, most rational people call "an argument". If you want to debunk his points, then actually debunk them, don't just try and smear the poster with ad hominem. Just to help you out, his arguments were:
    1) MS-DOS wasn't that bad
    2) Windows XP is viable
    3) SCO is more evil that Microsoft
Incidentally, the argument he was countering was that everything Microsoft has ever done is evil, and it is the most evil software company ever. If you've got time once you've demolished the above points, you can prove that argument for extra credit.

Go to it!