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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.
So, I can't make an API that mimics theirs because copyright?
If this stands, Java's vaunted claim to being on "billions of devices" will soon become the punchline to a bad joke.
Like libc, or whatever, or change licenses to an "Oracle Exclusion License" so stupid things like "Copyrighting APIs" get dropped and common sense rules again.
If Oracle open sourced Java, how can they be suing anyone?
Of what the TPP is going to do.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
WTF do they have to do with this case? This isn't a criminal proceeding, it's a civil matter.
This isn't about "protecting" Oracle (though there may be some $$$ influence involved), but rather more about protecting the copyright racket, strengthening it beyond the accepted scope.
APIs should not ever be copyrighted. Once you start doing that, it's only a matter of time before Disney copyrights all cartoon renderings of a mouse, or Nickelback gets to copyright all formulaic/generic rock.
Unfortunately... the Justice Department, likely at the behest of the White House, is intervening to influence copyright law and give corporations even more power. Ugh. It's like our government is pushing to see how far it can go to enslave citizens (the real, human kind, not the corporate nonsense kind) before they decide they've had enough of this shit.
I'd be inclined to chalk this up as a "First World Problem" but clamping down on technology denies everybody equal access. This is a serious infringement of our freedoms that will have a chilling effect on the progress of technology to help people in their daily lives everywhere in the world. It's not just about Java - it's about any programming language interface.
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):
The brief is quite well readable (modulo the awful scribus ui), try it!
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
Once they declare the API to be copyrightable, the SCO dementors will arise and attempt once more to cast darkness over Linux. Darl McBride must be snickering as he reads the Justice Department's response...
Just asking, because it seems to me as if someone wants this matter to be declared settled as is and for no good reason other than to guarantee a payout.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
DOJ: We recommend you don't take this important copyright case.
SCOTUS: Oh really, why is that?
DOJ: Corporate interest mostly, we are looking to create a new form of monopoly power, and Larry Ellison has some really cool Sailboats.
SCOTUS: Thanks for your recommendation, we are looking forward to hearing this case and just added it to the docket.
Complete rubbish, go educate yourself.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Looks like Obama's primary legacy may be to enshrine API copyrights in law. If this had been the law of the land in the 80's and 90's, Linux and FOSS would never have gotten off the ground.
Well... uphold that API copyright claim and while in the short term Google will have to cough up, in the medium term Google will just write a replacement, or just put more effort into that Go thing of theirs and use it the same way Apple use Objective C. Android is Java only because the guys who started the project chose it. We could use Go just as easily.
A pattern of Congress continually extending term lengths retroactively is not the same as a law declaring that copyrights do not expire, because the action that occurs if Congress does not act is that copyrights expire. Whereas in the latter scenario Congress has to act in order to make copyrights expire.
Each house of Congress also has to act every two years in order to set its rules. The requirement of a periodic formality to prevent copyrights from expiring does not change the practical outcome, just as the requirement of a periodic formality to readopt House and Senate rules every two years does not keep the House and Senate from having rules.
Nobody actually wants perpetual copyright terms, except maybe Disney.
And the Gershwin estate. And the leadership of the Motion Picture Assocation of America (to find sources, search the web for the phrase "forever less one day"). And Dr. Seuss Enterprises, whose argument in its Eldred amicus was that an author and his heirs deserve royalties from adaptations of the author's work to media invented decades after the work's first publication.
Or Google has been resisting the NSA a little too much.
This.
It's pretty obvious that this is a punishment for adding encryption to Android devices, and for going to SSL for all web transactions, making it much more difficult to spy, despite administrative objections.
The recommendation is clearly punitive because Google has pissed the executive off, and consistently opted on the side of data protection, and has disclosed many of the recently discovered OpenSSL and SSSL protocol flaws which made eavesdropping easier.
Wouldn't this be akin to attempting to copyright a book title? Each API is a title for the implementation it describes. You can not copyright titles, names , short phrases and slogans. An API seems to fall squarely into all of these.
-USR1
Microsoft licensed Java from Sun, but there was problem that compliance to license meant passing compatibility tests so Sun later sued Microsoft. Microsoft paid their way out of that situation but later dropped J++ itself. It reused some of that tech in other products.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
You're honor, you probably don't want to read the case. "Why not. It's a matter of public record". Yes, but the index is copyrighted. It's $5000/copy. Good luck finding the case without the index. "$5000 per copy? That's preposterous. Indexing is trivial compared to the arguments in the case". Why yes, yes it is...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If this is so, then Nokia can now assert copyright over fork().
Nokia now owns Bell Labs through a long chain of acquisitions. Bell Labs publicly asserted copyright over fork() in the Lions Commentary.
Nokia should now assert infringement over Solaris and the UEK. A sizable portion of Exadata revenues are fairly owed should this decision stand.
Oracle must have contributed to the right Administration official.
No.
The United States Solicitor General's Office writes a *LOT* of these "op" briefs. Generally ten pages saying "This case isn't so magically important that SCOTUS should look at it among the thousands of cases people are asking to look at." Taking that position on a case is the default position and nothing should be read into it.
They are for the most part really top-tier professionals who are trying to make the decision based on what is best for the US Government as an institution. Not influenced very much by politics. They are widely considered the "tenth justice," and really care about (1) whether the case is important, (2) whether the case presents the issues it's about well (i.e. is it a good vehicle for the issue), (3) whether the case has facts that are favorable for getting to what the government thinks is in its interest, etc...
They do call around to get the opinions of the various affected agencies in determining whether to support an appeal. They probably talked to someone from the PTO when figuring out what the government position should be.
But at the end of the day, it's important to realize that SCOTUS can still take up the issue in another case if they want to--maybe one with better facts, etc...; and they won't be bound by the Federal Circuit's ruling here.
They are for the most part really top-tier professionals who are trying to make the decision based on what is best for the US Government as an institution. Not influenced very much by politics. They are widely considered the "tenth justice," and really care about (1) whether the case is important, (2) whether the case presents the issues it's about well (i.e. is it a good vehicle for the issue), (3) whether the case has facts that are favorable for getting to what the government thinks is in its interest, etc...
Well, in this case they have clearly failed as the case is obviously very important (can overturn the whole concept of SDK-s) and is pretty clear-cut. So it appears the government thinks it's in its interest to sink the whole digital revolution. Well, considering that a moderate AI might perform better in their jobs, they might be right...
The SCOTUS is free to ignore the DOJ on this and take the case anyway.
... OpenSSL and SSSL protocol flaws ...
South Shore Soccer League has a protocol of their own? ;)
It also means that if we got a Congress that actually wanted to retroactively shorten copyright terms they can.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Major copyright owners would consider a term reduction to be "private property be[ing] taken for public use, without just compensation" per the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution (and foreign counterparts) and sue the government for said "just compensation".
the courts are wrong
By definition, the Supreme Court of the United States is never wrong. Only an amendment can override the Supreme Court's opinion on a statute's constitutionality.