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

Posted by timothy on from the leave-well-enough-alone dept.

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.

25 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Clean room implementation? by ardentsoap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, I can't make an API that mimics theirs because copyright?

    1. Re:Clean room implementation? by kennykb · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Clean room implementation? by XanC · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Can they make Compaq's reverse engineering of IBM's BIOS illegal retroactively, and take back much of the PC revolution?

    3. Re:Clean room implementation? by The+Rizz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If copyright governs interfaces, that part of the law will keep the government from stealing IP away from its rightful owners after twenty years.

      You mean stop government from returning it to the rightful owners. The public (and public domain) are the rightful owners of all information and works - copyright/patents just give exclusive use for a time.

    4. Re:Clean room implementation? by jandrese · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If the laws we have now were in place back then the computer revolution wouldn't have happened. We would still be paying $5000 for IBM Mainframe access terminals.

      Or in a slightly less Dystopian view, computers today would look like iPhones, with one vendor having a stranglehold on the platform and completely anemic third party hardware support outside of cosmetics.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    5. Re:Clean room implementation? by sycodon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oracle must have contributed to the right Administration official.

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    6. Re:Clean room implementation? by Immerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I believe it's not that you can't use the API, but that you can't interface non-GPL code with the kernel due to the restrictions of the GPL. That you would use the API to do so is incidental to that restriction.

      If instead you want to build your own kernel implementing the same API, I don't believe they have any objection.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    7. Re:Clean room implementation? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why because the court asked for the government's opinion?

      No. Because the government's opinion sounds like it was written by Oracle's general counsel

    8. Re:Clean room implementation? by s.petry · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    9. Re:Clean room implementation? by NostalgiaForInfinity · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google did a copy/paste of the Java source code into their own source code.

      Google probably does copy/paste of the Java source code all the time, like lots of other people, because it's open source, so that is a meaningless accusation.

      Google distributed interface definitions that look very similar to Oracle's. That's probably because in Java, there really aren't a lot of different ways of describing the same interface. Furthermore, interfaces should not usually be considered copyrightable.

      Google also distributed some copyrighted Java source files. That was stupid, but those files appear to have been test cases, not code that ships on handsets, and it appears to have been unintentional. It's hard to argue that Oracle suffered any harm from that and Google came into compliance.

    10. Re:Clean room implementation? by UdoKeir · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or Google has been resisting the NSA a little too much.

    11. Re:Clean room implementation? by Immerman · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
  2. Java is done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    If this stands, Java's vaunted claim to being on "billions of devices" will soon become the punchline to a bad joke.

    1. Re:Java is done by ardentsoap · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's almost like Oracle is trying to kill Java. Wouldn't it have been easier to let Sun implode and fade away?

    2. Re:Java is done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but that would take a couple billion years.

    3. Re:Java is done by dAzED1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sun was flush with cash at the time of the acquisition, and also had a great deal of solid IP and customer faith. Solaris prior to Oracle was *the* most solid OS available in my opinion, and sparcs were always great for their target audience. Sun's only problem is the market became too commodity - fabbers need to make billions of chips now to stay competitive, and that just wasn't possible. But Sun had paths forward to fix these things - they were actually on the right road already, imo - forming ties with AMD, coming up with a way to keep their core but become commodity, by giving AMD access to high tech they needed. A road that Oracle took them off - Sun would be just fine today if Oracle hadn't bought them.

  3. Someone claim (C) on something oracle depend on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Wasn't Java open sourced? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Mini Sample by koan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of what the TPP is going to do.

    --
    "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
  6. Justice Department? by BenJeremy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Java API: Copyrighted, but hope for fair use! by paskie · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

    --
    It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
  8. Supreme court to DOJ, Challenge Accepted by Proudrooster · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  9. Re:Wasn't Java open sourced? by Hardhead_7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is why when Microsoft open sourced the new .NET framework recently, they also included a "Covenant not the Sue" document saying you were free to re-implement the .NET API with your own code. Basically, promising not to pull an Oracle. The upshot is .NET is now more free-as-in-freedom than Java. It's enough to make your head explode.

  10. Re:Wasn't Java open sourced? by NostalgiaForInfinity · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. MOD PARENT UP! by tlambert · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.