Opposition Mounts To Oracle's Attempt To Copyright Java APIs

An anonymous reader writes with a bit from Groklaw: "The remarkable outpouring of support for Google in the Oracle v. Google appeal continues, with a group of well-known innovators, start-ups, and those who fund them — innovators like Ray Ozzie, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Dan Bricklin, and Esther Dyson — standing with [Thursday's] group of leading computer scientists in telling the court that Oracle's attempt to copyright its Java APIs would be damaging to innovation." As usual, Groklaw gives a cogent, readable introduction to the issue.

Comments

Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the link?

Re:Link?

[sgt scrub]

Slashdot readers needing a link so they can read the article? I see why you posted anonymous.

Re:Link?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Re: Anyhow, my conspiracy theory is that maybe /. has reached a tippiong point where whatever corporation currently owns /. doesn't get enough click-referral revenue, so they've stopped bothering to link to the articles?

aha!!! I am inclined to agree with you. Though Timothy's history of bizarre posting behavior may mean it's just the same old same old, you may have hit upon the real truth with your conspiracy theory! I breathe along with you. [look up the meaning of conspiracy...]

Re:Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482

Re:Link?

[maxwell demon]

But if we have no link, how are we to know which server we shall melt away?

WTF?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Oracle think they can just jump in and claim ownership of APIs that are in the Java specification -- most of which were added to the spec via the JSR process? They have no chance here.

Re:WTF?!?

[game kid]

On the contrary, they were really good at making people and distro maintainers move from their MySQL to MariaDB.

Re:WTF?!?

[Aryden]

Their whole point was to monetize Java. They want money from the "4 billion devices that run Java" which they aren't getting. It's not the branding they are concerned with, that is taken care of via trademark, this is all about the use of Java apis.

Re:WTF?!?

[binarylarry]

A Java fork would be great.

Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.

Re:WTF?!?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Named for his 2 daughters, who were named by their mothers.

Re:WTF?!?

[devent]

Java is already "forked". The OpenJDK project is since Java 7 the reference implementation for Java and is licensed under the GPL.
Nothing prevents you to write a custom installer without the Ask toolbar or whatever. Every Linux distribution ships OpenJDK in the main repositories.

Re:WTF?!?

[Smallpond]

A Java fork would be great.

Get control away from shitbags like Oracle over to some kind of foundation. Get rid of the fucking Ask toolbar spyware, improve the platform more quickly, etc.

A fork wouldn't help since Oracle is asserting copyright on the API, not the code.

Re:WTF?!?

[AuMatar]

But it compiles Java code and has a big chunk of the Java standard library. I'd call that Java, I don't care what type of VM its running on.

Here's the link

[PatientZero]

. . . to Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal.

Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link?

[girlinatrainingbra]

Hey Timothy, wake up! How about the link?

Here it is in case you can't find it:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130531131600482

"Innovators, Entrepreneurs and Funds File Amicus in Support of Google in Oracle v. Google Appeal ~pj"

The End

[PCK]

However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.

I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.

Re:The End

[Nerdfest]

It was Sun that did that, then perhaps IBM. Certainly not Oracle.

Re:The End

[jd2112]

However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.

I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.

Oracle has practically every corporation in the world by the balls (i.e. all their corporate data is locked up in Oracle databases and business logic in Oracle applications). They could start killing babies and it wouldn't affect their bottom line.

Re:The End

[VortexCortex]

However unlikely it is that Oracle wins this, if this were to pass it would be the end of the software industry as we know it.

I really hope that somehow there is some kind of backlash against Oracle when this ends. Well I can dream at least.

I do not agree with you. I think Oracle should win this. It's going to get far worse before it gets better. I'd much rather sooner than later. For instance: If there were ice everywhere and I were an Eskimo, would you try to sell me the ice? No? Then why do folks think it's OK to sell me, a PC owner, infinitely reproducible bits? It's because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of information and work. A mechanic is not granted a limited (70 year beyond their death) monopoly over the work they perform. They have an infinite monopoly to leverage before you do your work, after the work is done and paid for, then you have no monopoly. You don't get to charge each time I start up the car. You shouldn't get to charge for each copy of the bits, you can only do so because laws that support the economically untenable practice of Artificial Scarcity. The work has already been done. You want more money, do more work. Make an estimate / proposal, agree on a price, do the work. Do not seek rent for those who use the work afterwards, get assurance your work will be paid for up front... Like every other labor industry already does. Then you can put an end piracy, by abolishing patent and copyright laws.

Make no mistake. This will happen. It is starting to happen that those who "Publish" content are not necessary. We can all pay the workers directly now. Publishers add no value to the work. They will become publicists / advertizers / marketers of your ability to do work, instead of resellers of artificially scarce bits. This is the first Internet Generation generation -- growing up with fully connected in the Age of Information. The business models will have to adjust. You speak of the end of the software industry as you know it. Indeed. The way it works now is down right retarding, and ridiculously out of touch with reality. Oracle should win because it will point out how stupid Copyright and Patents actually are.

Further: No Scientist can condone the practice of operating under unproven hypotheses. There is no proof that Copyright, or "the software industry as we know it" is actually benefical for society as a whole. No one did any test. They all assumed it was so because the English had a patent and copyright law, so do we. That's bad science, and if you are a scientist, yes even a computer scientist, then you should feel it in the pit of your stomach: That dread that you are running your life and the entire economy of the world based on an unproven, untested, untenable hypothesis.

For Shame.

Re:The End

[garyebickford]

I was there in the days when "you won't get fired for buying IBM", and IBM VPs would get flown in to talk to your boss' boss' boss' to tell them that their 14th level underling was considering buying a non-IBM peripheral, and that while IBM encouraged fair competition, the presence of a non-IBM peripheral 'might' delay support response until it was proved that the peripheral had nothing to do with the problem, and "your company might have to be shut down while the problem was worked out." It was extortion, pure and simple. And it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)

See where IBM is now. It could happen to Oracle. Customers don't like any vendor having them by the balls, even when they are nice about it, and Oracle has never, in my experience, been nice. But those are cool boats! :D

Re:The End

[Billly Gates]

There is proof in Oracle's behavior. ... or if we want to be literal highly probably odds that the sole reason for this is to ban Android and extort money from people and raise the cost of apps and phones and kill free apps on all but IPhones. Why else would Oracle do this and wow would they have a tight squeeze on the new mobile markets balls by this!

Copyrights are by their nature monopolies. Similar to patents but covers expressions rather than actual devices.

It can also be reasonably argued that this will hurt other unrelated software cases as lawyers quote other court cases as real facts until they are overthrown. MS could claim they own wine, samba, reactOS, etc. SCO could now claim they own Linux all over again merely because it contains sed, awk, sh, and has the same commands. If you make a clean room implementation then SCO owns it even if you write it. Thats what a copyright is a monopoly and owner ship of work.

Yes publishers too own all their work and can sue your for copyright infringement too by reprinting.

Re:The End

[Kjella]

Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be? And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh. If you want custom development it's going to be $50+ a day at minimum wage, many hundred dollars a day if you want it to actually work (if that's not a requirement you can put it on rent-a-coder too) and nobody's going to "take one for the team". And you've got no guarantee you'll get what you wanted unless you have an iron-clad contract listing exact deliveries with no cure, no pay conditions - and you still have to fight the developer over it. Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.

People in general don't want that risk, plain and simply. I don't want to fund an author that is looking to write a book or even pay chapter by chapter if I feel there's a risk he'll just leave me hanging in the middle. I'd like him to write it, then I can choose to buy it or not. That is your analogy fail, I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does" but in your world everything in the store should then be free, because all the work is already done. Real world goods have overhead too, it's not like the price of a pound of beef is literally all cost attached to that pound, there were probably lots of fixed cost that'd be paid if that cow was there or not. But that overhead was spread across all pounds of beef the way a developer spreads his overhead (that is, actually writing it) across all the copies.

Or the TL;DR version: I think $1 for Angry Birds was a bloody good deal and don't see it happening without copyright to organize the "pooling".

Re:The End

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but a "successor in interest" is not responsible for, nor the cause of the actions of, the succeeded.

Re:The End

[radarskiy]

"They could start killing babies and it wouldn't affect their bottom line."

Of course it would affect the bottom line. Do you think they'd be killing babies for free?

Re:The End

[Rudolf]

And it worked until they lost the anti-trust suit (which started in 1969, lasted 13 years!)

IBM didn't lose. The government dropped the case in 1982.

http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/library/collections/manuscripts/findingaids/ibmantitrustpart2.ACC1980.htm#bioghist

... the case was withdrawn by William F. Baxter, assistant attorney general in charge of the Antitrust Division, Department of Justice, on January 8, 1982. Baxter signed a Stipulation of Dismissal that stated the government's charges were "without merit."

Re:The End

[stenvar]

Photoshop was a low-end rip-off of other software developed and published mostly with government funds or to address specific in-house needs. Most of the libraries to build Photoshop were developed by others and effectively available for free. The original Photoshop also wasn't a very complicated program, and because there were several widely used existing versions from other vendors, the risk was nearly nil. So I'd say the first copy of Photoshop should have been nearly free.

In fact, that's true for a lot of the software you use day-to-day: the people making the big bucks are usually not the people who originally put in the hard work and took the big risks. Instead, after the original development, someone swoops in, takes no significant risks, clones the best parts of existing software, sells it really cheap (they had none of the overhead), then markets the hell out of it, and finally runs the innovators out of business. And unfortunately software patents just aren't a feasible mechanism stopping that.

The current patent and copyright system rewards such behavior and punishes innovators. It's arguably even worse than not having IP protection on software at all.

*sigh*

[Atzanteol]

As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Oracle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.

Re:*sigh*

[adrn01]

As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Oracle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.

Everyone keeps misspelling that. Correct spelling is now:

As a Java developer let me just say - God I hate Orcacle... Can't we just turn Java over to the Apache project now? They would be far better stewards of the technology. Christ *anybody* would probably be a better steward of it than Oracle.

Re:*sigh*

[Nerdfest]

The best thing you can do is to start moving towards languages with truly open specs and APIs, like C has. Go may fit the bill, but I'm not sure. The other thing is to do absolutely everything you can at home and at work, to stop *any* money going to Oracle and companies like them. Move towards open-source, or products from companies that play more nicely with others. If these companies don't get punished in the profit department, they don't take notice. There are enough senior people here and on other forums that a *severe* dent could be made in Oracle.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical Java approach. 3 lines of code for a two letter patch that changes nothing useful and doesn't match the documentation,.

Re:*sigh*

[garyebickford]

And end software patents. And a pony.

Re:*sigh*

[Billly Gates]

The best thing you can do is to start moving towards languages with truly open specs and APIs, like C has. Go may fit the bill, but I'm not sure. The other thing is to do absolutely everything you can at home and at work, to stop *any* money going to Oracle and companies like them. Move towards open-source, or products from companies that play more nicely with others. If these companies don't get punished in the profit department, they don't take notice. There are enough senior people here and on other forums that a *severe* dent could be made in Oracle.

No that is not the best solution because lawyers quote other cases like the laws of God of correct interpretation.

This means you can't use wine, reactOS, and maybe Linux itself as SCO can now claim they own the exact string of characters that spell out cat, dir, ls, sed, awk, shell, sh, etc. I believe MS bought rights to either C or C++ some years ago so they could claim printf is an intellectual property of Microsoft and you need a license to run it.

Severe dent in Oracle?? In the real world your bosses bosses boss makes the decision after a round of golf with Oracle or some shitty IE 6 app that meets a need that has Oracle specific crap calls in the product. You either support or get another job!

Besides I am playing with the Android SDK and no I wont buy an expensive mac and switch to ios or downgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7 to make some windows phone app instead. Why should I?

We need to fight this and pay the EFF and FSF and donate. Maybe if they filed friends of the court with Google it can convince a non-technical judge?

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Tasty sizzling ponyburgers, that's why.

Re:*sigh*

[elashish14]

See? Nobody cares about the patents.

Re:*sigh*

[Nerdfest]

I'm not talking about punishing Oracle if they win. They should be punished regardless, even for just bringing the case to the courts. As I said, there are many senior people here. Douchebag marketing only goes so far.

Re:*sigh*

[TapeCutter]

If you start purging vendors from the company every time you don't agree with a court decision then you are unlikely to hold that senior position for very long. Also if you want others to "play nice" then do so yourself and stop trying to preempt the court's decision.

Re:*sigh*

[Nerdfest]

Personally, I don't care about the court decisions. There is often a difference between legal and ethical. If people start avoiding companies that only respect one of the two then perhaps things will be a little nicer.

Re:*sigh*

[sjames]

No, it's Oracle as in someone who huffs natural gas all day and then says whatever comes into their head.

both money and control, The Oracle Way

[swschrad]

perhaps you haven't heard. Oracle grinds the last drop out of the turnip and takes the shoes for resale on the way out of the conference room. there is a reason that Larry Ellison can spend 3 months a year racing sailboats and flaunt FAA noise rules flying back home after quiet hours night after night. it's called money, honey, and they excel in it.

considering it takes Oracle longer to patch an exploit in Java than it does for Apple to patch an exploit, if indeed they acknowledge one, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to let ol Larry take 120 percent of nothing, and standardize on another universal API across the web.

Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way

[turgid]

considering it takes Oracle longer to patch an exploit in Java than it does for Apple to patch an exploit, if indeed they acknowledge one, perhaps it would not be a bad thing to let ol Larry take 120 percent of nothing, and standardize on another universal API across the web.

This is the correct answer.

Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way

[Anonymous Coward]

The Google lawsuit is a legacy of old Sun staff that Oracle inherited and daren't just abandone.

No, it isn't. Jonathan Schwartz has made it clear repeatedly, in court even, that Sun would never have brought this lawsuit. And he did welcome Android's use of the Java programming language when it was announced.

Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way

[tolkienfan]

There's a difference between Larry Ellison and God:
God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

Re:both money and control, The Oracle Way

[Zontar The Mindless]

And they don't *want* MySQL to succeed: they want it *dead* in the industrial space, so people will use Oracle's much more prifitable databases. They bought Sun to get the commercial database customer list, to shoot that incompatible Sun architectural oddness through the head, and to shut MySQL down.

This is EXACTLY why Oracle have, I dunno, *doubled* the number of devs and QA working on MySQL! It's all a ruse! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Oracle do a lot of things. Things that waste tonnes of money--e.g. paying hundreds of staff to develop a product you're planning to discontinue--are generally not among them.

No innovators needed...

[gnasher719]

.. to object to this. These good people basically say "it would be godawful if Oracle managed to get a copyright on APIs". What they should say is "according to copyright laws, APIs are not material that can be protected by copyright". Because that is what matters to a court. _If_ APIs could be protected by copyright (which they can't) it would be absolutely wrong for a judge to listen to these people.

(Why do APIs not have copyright protection? Because copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation. If a file contains just the API itself, it is not protected. If it contains comments, preferably in poetic form, the file cannot be copied, but still the API can be extracted. And making use of the API description is most definitely not protected by copyright law).

Re:No innovators needed...

[UnknowingFool]

The code behind an API can be protected but the interface itself being protected would defeat the purpose of the API. I think APIs fall under scènes à faire.

Re:No innovators needed...

[DrJimbo]

If you were familiar with the case you would know that one of Oracle's main arguments in its appeal is that APIs are currently protected by copyright and Alsup's ruling (against making APIs copyrightable) has upset the status quo. Yes, IMO Oracle's lawyers should be severely sanctioned for tying up the courts with such utter rubbish, but they haven't been (yet) so this is what the fight is about.

Given this context, these Amici Curiae briefs make perfect sense. Oracle is lying through its teeth about what the current state of affairs is in order to swindle the court and make a quick buck. It was almost essential for people to refute Oracle's BS&F lies in order to keep the legal battle grounded in reality.

The law firm BS&F has been filing bogus lawsuits like this for ten years now. They started by getting paid $20 million for the Microsoft funded SCO attacks against FOSS. They will continue to clog the courts with their BS & FUD until it is no longer economically profitable for them to do so. I think they should be fined $20 million (or more) for their cumulative egregious behavior over the past 10 years and that money should be used to compensate those who have been injured by their shenanigans. You need to catch them in the act and punish them right away or they will never learn.

Re:No innovators needed...

[davecb]

The law is predicated on the results being desirable: monopolies are illegal unless they fit the terms of the (U.S.) copyright act, authorized by the constitution. If the result is a catastrophy, the law is unconstitutional.

That is what is important to the courts.

--dave

Be careful where you tread

[sk999]

If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs? Does every Java programmer need to add a comment "Copyright Oracle" to every file that uses a Java API?

The software industry as a whole has been very cavalier about APIs. It is not hard to find examples of big vendors like Microsoft, IBM, or DEC claiming copyright ownership of APIs taken from elsewhere. In return, rarely, if ever, do they become involved in litigation claiming ownership. Some vendors (e.g., The Open Group) consider use of APIs (including implementation) to be covered by "fair use".

Oracle wants to tread in waters that the industry as a whole has deliberately avoided in the past.

I am not a Java developer, and give the way that Oracle has turned the language into toxic waste, I doubt I will ever become one.

Re:Be careful where you tread

[Billly Gates]

No it doesn't.

However, if you were Google or IceTea you couldn't make a clean room implementation as the words and phrases to make a program source compatible is owned by Oracle.

By extension you must now pay Oracle $999 for JavaSE or whatever the fuck Oracle wants to charge as no competition is allowed to exist.

Microsoft would also use this to end SAMBA (A.D compatibility for Linux and MacOSX), Wine, and ReactOS. After all MS would own the exact words and strings of characters of each API call and can quote this case as an example.

Sco can rise from the grave too and claim they own sh, sed, awk, ed, vi, cat, and all of unix because it looks the same and has the same characters as Unixware etc cleanroom implementation or not.

Re:Be careful where you tread

[dgatwood]

If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs?

They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes. IMO, if Oracle somehow magically wins this case, Google's next move should be to buy Novell and counter-sue Oracle for violating their UNIX API copyright for the past 31 years, at which point, it's buh-bye, Oracle.

Re:Be careful where you tread

[dgatwood]

An application including the library doesn't include the API.

Actually, it does. A compiler cannot know how to work with an object without first reading a header file, class file, etc. that defines its interface. If (and only if) the interface definition itself is protected by copyright, then the act of including a header file or class file is, by definition, combining that interface definition with the new application's code, which makes it a derivative work in precisely the same way that a mix tape is a derivative of the original recordings.

This is why interfaces are considered to not be protectable by copyright. It is a fundamental requirement for software authorship to be legal.

Re:Groklaw's Gas Pedal analogy

[maxwell demon]

The users of Java are the developers of Java programs. The end users use Java in the same sense as someone taking a taxi uses a car. You don't care where the gas pedal is in the taxi you're taking, as long as the taxi driver is able to correctly use it. But the taxi driver certainly cares.

Re:Groklaw's Gas Pedal analogy

[drgould]

Let's not "dumb down" the issue by making analogies that don't really apply.

Analogies are like scabs. If you pick at them, they bleed.

Re:Still ?

[mark-t]

Already decided in court? Yes. Settled? Far from it.

This is about Oracle trying to appeal the former decision.

Re:Groklaw's Gas Pedal analogy

[mark-t]

Developers *ARE* the end users of an API.

Re:Oracle is stupid...

[fibonacci8]

Where it's headed is Motorola, Intel, and the other processor manufacturers would have a field day asking Oracle for their API usage royalties.

"Where IBM is now???!?!"

[brunes69]

What do you mean.. worth 230 billion dollars vs. Oracles 160? Having 10x the EPS of Oracle? 19th on the Forbes 100 (vs Oracles 89th) ?

I would think Oracle would LOVE to be where IBM is now.

Re:"Where IBM is now???!?!"

[garyebickford]

But IBM did nearly go bankrupt, and it is not at all the same company that it was then, either economically or socially.

Re:Why did Google 'copy' Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, replicated APIs were in java.lang.* - classes like Array and Exception which are basically baked in the specification of language. Even if you aren't going to touch Java the platform, you will need those if you use Java the language (you're aware of distinction, right?)

PS: So, are you saying that something like Wine is infringing, or that Google is not infringing?

I thought that scheme had been shot down.

[__aaltlg1547]

Didn't this come up in court last year and didn't the court send Oracle packing?

BS&FUD

[tepples]

The law firm BS&F [...] will continue to clog the courts with their BS & FUD

It surprised me that Google Search thinks you're the first to expand the F in BS&F's name this way. Google bs&f bs&fud (sco OR oracle) failed to turn up anything. Congratulations on coming up with something that isn't an old meme.

Re:Perhaps it is for the best.

[ArcadeMan]

Man, don't get me *started* on garbage collection!!!!

I agree with you. Last tuesday these jerks just tossed my garbage can on its side after emptying it.