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Supreme Court May Decide the Fate of APIs (But Also Klingonese and Dothraki)

Posted by timothy on from the will-people-finally-stop-saying-frak? dept.

New submitter nerdpocalypse writes: In a larger battle than even Godzilla v. Mothra, Google v. Oracle threatens not only Japan but the entire nerd world. What is at stake is how a language can be [copyrighted]. This affects not just programming languages, APIs, and everything that runs ... well ... everything, but also the copyright status of new languages such as Klingon and Dothraki.

4 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. SFLC's brief explains parts of this well by ciaran2014 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Software Freedom Law Center's brief regarding whether the Supreme Court should take the case or not:

    https://www.softwarefreedom.or...

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    Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
    1. Re:SFLC's brief explains parts of this well by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 3, Informative

      Bullshit. If your point is correct, then Compaq's reverse engineered BIOS was illegal and the whole era of the PC Clone was a violation of IBM's IP rights. We'd need to pry the BIOS out of every PC Compatible in existence. And since IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore, that means we all cease using desktop and laptop PCs. It probably even applies to Apple by this point.

  2. Re:I don't get it by tlambert · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why can't Google just ship an OpenJDK build for ARM instead of screwing around with breaking the portability contract of the byte code?

    For the same reason that they went with Dalvik, and the same reason their libc is derived from BSD libc (Bionic), instead of GLibc: to get out from under the license, and allow, indisputably, commercial code for which source code is not provided, and to (effectively) technologically, rather than merely legally, indemnify developers, in order to attract commercial developers to the platform.

    Oracle has tried to get a piece of Android on and off for years, the same way it tried to get a piece of Linux, and the same way it bought out MySQL and the BSD dbm libraries, when they couldn't legally raise their hand against them.

  3. Re:I had to laugh when I read this... by gnupun · · Score: 2, Informative

    Second, yes, using the same titles is, in fact, okay [copyright.gov].

    The pdf states "Copyright not available for titles and short phrases." But the table of contents of a book is not one phrase, rather it is a sequence of dozens of phrases. So it should be copyrightable, like API.

    Google has copied the premise of the book (Java platform), its table of contents (API) and rewritten the text within the chapters (reimplementing API) but keeping the same ToC. It should license the stuff it copied (API/ToC).

    Fourth, what does it take to be a standard in your mind? What is your opinion on the Java platform documentation?

    Oracle still owns the standard. Just because something is standardized by a company, does not mean it is free to use by other entities.