Oracle Clings To Java API Copyrights

An anonymous reader writes in with a story about some of the ramifications of the Oracle-Google lawsuit. "You could hear a collective sigh of relief from the software developer world when Judge William Alsup issued his ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit. Oracle lost on pretty much every point, but the thing that must have stuck most firmly in Oracle’s throat was this: 'So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical. Under the rules of Java, they must be identical to declare a method specifying the same functionality — even when the implementation is different. When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression. And, while the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked, copyright protection never extends to names or short phrases as a matter of law.'"

Comments

Re:Wrong in quite a few ways.

[phantomfive]

The jerkiness of Google is they went against the direct wishes of the creator of the project. Sun wanted to make sure that Java was compatible with Java anywhere, which is why they sued Microsoft for adding incompatibilities.

Sun decided they wanted to make Java open source, but took measures to make sure any new implementation would be compatible. They did whatever they could to make sure it would be.

Then Google decided to make an incompatible version, apparently to avoid the J2ME license issues, but for whatever reason, they made it incompatible. Not cool.