US Justice Department Urges Supreme Court Not To Take Up Google v. Oracle

New submitter Areyoukiddingme writes: The Solicitor General of the Justice Department has filed a response to the US Supreme Court's solicitation of advice regarding the Google vs. Oracle ruling and subsequent overturning by the Federal Circuit. The response recommends that the Federal Circuit ruling stand, allowing Oracle to retain copyright to the Java API.

Comments

Re:Wasn't Java open sourced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google didn't use the open source version (OpenJDK is GPL). They reimplemented it with a more permissive license (Apache2). Oracle is saying they are not allowed to do that.

Re:Clean room implementation?

[kennykb]

Yes. Exactly.

It's all about the term of copyright versus the term of patent. Patent lasts only twenty years at present, while copyright is effectively perpetual (whenever Pooh and Mickey might enter the public domain, the legislators fix it). If copyright governs interfaces, that part of the law will keep the government from stealing IP away from its rightful owners after twenty years.

Java API: Copyrighted, but hope for fair use!

[paskie]

TL;DR: US executive shares the appeals court opinion that APIs are copyrightable, but that does not mean the copyright is enforceable - there will be another court case that will be about if it's fair use to re-implement the (copyrighted) API.

Here is maybe the most important paragraph (italics mine):

Despite the inherently functional character of all computer code, the Copyright Act makes clear that such code can be copyrightable. Nothing about the declaring code (API declarations) at issue here materially distinguishes it from other computer code ... . Although petitioner has raised important concerns about the effects that enforcing respondent's copyright could have on software development, those concerns are better addressed through petitioner's fair-use defense, which will be considered on remand.

The brief is quite well readable (modulo the awful scribus ui), try it!

Re:Clean room implementation?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are playing semantic nonsense games. If something is in the public domain, then the public owns it. It's not that no one owns it. It's that everyone owns it.

Re:Clean room implementation?

[s.petry]

The Laws we have in place are the same as we had back then. The main difference today is that people holding public offices tend to flaunt their pay-for-play status, where back in the 80s/90s they were still attempting to hide it. The biggest harm to IT took a while to get precedents set, but really started almost immediately with "ideas" being patented and copyrighted (you can thank the first Bush for that lovely patent reform).

As an example, Athena (X) was developed mostly by DARPA funding and grant money. Yet we had to see 32 screens worth of copyrights just to start the Xserver (okay, 32 is an exaggeration but the point remains). Some of these were to Universities like MIT, Berkley, and Stanford. Many others though were to Novell, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, etc.. etc... And no, these were not "credits", but copyrights. This is why Linux started with a pretty old version of X and basically had to reinvent the wheel. Linux had 1 crappy pay-for version of CDE because some schlep company ended up buying copyrights to extort money from people.

Re:Wasn't Java open sourced?

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Here is what the copyright case was about:

The copyright phase consisted of several distinct claims of infringement: a nine-line rangeCheck function, several test files, the structure, sequence and organization of the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and the API documentation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O....

No matter what Google may have copied, according to Oracle's own court case and allegations, they did not create a single API by copy-and-paste, as you allege.

The only "actual Java source code" copied is these nine lines:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
          if (fromIndex > toIndex)
                    throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                              ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
          if (fromIndex < 0)
                    throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
          if (toIndex > arrayLen)
                    throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

But, actually, these lines pretty much follow from normal Java programming conventions; whether or not Google actually copied them, they should not be covered by copyright law since they are not creative.

So, in different words, you're a liar.

Re:Clean room implementation?

[Immerman]

No, it does not. Re-read my post after you've had your morning coffee. You're free to use the API however you want, it's presumed not copyrightable. The *one* exception is using it for interacting with the Linux kernel, because the kernel *is* protected from such access by the GPL, and only GPL-compatible code is allowed to interact with its internals. The API is irrelevant to that fact - it's simply the interface used by those who *are* allowed to interact.