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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
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.
If you go back and read the extensive coverage of the original trial, you would discover that you are arguing for the opposite of what the original court decided.
The decision was that the API _interface_ itself is not copyrightable, but the implementation behind that interface was. That is what open source (and any sane closed source) software project requires. The judge took the time to learn how to program Java as part of his research, and crafted a well-reasoned and documented response.
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.