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Android Is 'Fair Use' As Google Beats Oracle In $9 Billion Lawsuit (arstechnica.com)
infernalC writes: Ars Technica is reporting that the verdict is in, and that the jury decided that Google's duplication of several Java interfaces is fair use. Ars Technica writes that Google's Android OS does not infringe upon Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by "fair use." The jury unanimously answered "yes" in response to whether or not Google's use of Java APIs was a "fair use" under copyright law. The trial is now over, since Google won. "Google's win somewhat softens the blow to software developers who previously thought programming language APIs were free to use," Ars Technica writes. "It's still the case that APIs can be protected by copyright under the law of at least one appeals court. However, the first high-profile attempt to control APIs with copyright law has now been stymied by a "fair use" defense." The amount Oracle may have asked for in damages could have been as much as $9 billion.
Sometimes, juries do the right/sane thing.
Now PLEASE, supreme court, et al, don't let this warm feeling go away by overturning this.
I think Oracle needs to change to a new company motto, like "Don't Be Evil!".
i though sco lost because it was shown they didn't own unix not that api's weren't copyrightable
The trial is now over,
Oracle has threatened to appeal (because of the way the instructions to the jury were phrased), and in fact has filed a motion for JOML, which would overturn the jury's decision (basically they asked the judge to evaluate the evidence and determine whether a non-descript 'reasonable' jury would find it fair use).
So expect this to last for the rest of the year at least.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
well, don't know anything about the jury, but the judge I reckon has really earned respect from communities like this because to better understand the situation, he got quite familiar with Java itself: http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/...
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
This is not over in terms of the industry as a whole. A jury decision does not create precedent. Instead, the decision is merely that this specific use, by these specific parties, *with this specific jury*, constitutes fair use. A different jury in a different case may and will find differently. Google was the biggest target, but it's not the only target.
Larry Ellison won't be getting a new super-mega yacht.
Well if Google lost this case, it would open up pandora's box of lawsuits from here on. It would allow companies to sue pretty much every app dev that makes an app if it uses an api which likely 99.9% do.
You suck. I'm glad your attempt to poop in the pool failed.
It is possible to have a thriving business without attempting to screw over everyone else. I hope you try it some time.
It would appear that the judge and jury are owed an apology.
Are you sure it wasn't a case of the lawyer for Google translating the case into a metaphor that the jury could understand, like putting too much air into a balloon?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
In court it's not over until all the appeals are exhausted. Oracle will appeal this.
All existing companies could easily lose the war since the AI superbrain of the 2070s that will make everything else obsolete might be put on the market by a company founded by someone who's just been born.
Ezekiel 23:20
I bet Google made a secret deal with the judge to expunge his entire search history.
Trolling is a art,
Oracle's Lawyer stated: "They copied 11,500 lines of code," Oracle attorney Peter Bicks said during closing arguments. "It's undisputed. They took the code, they copied it, and put it right into Android." My understanding is that google used the api's but wrote their own implementation, what does he base that accusation on?
I'm sure there will be appeals and Oracle will keep pushing the issue, but for now, it's a good thing. Frankly, it'll keep people using Java for longer, which helps Oracle a bit. Of course, Oracle and IBM are just fine locking people into insanely expensive middleware platforms too.
Personally. I'd more than like to see Java fade into maturity. It's clunky, verbose and many of the frameworks they use are showing their age. Of course, I'm biased having done recent work in C#. I've just gotten very used to it's asynchronous programming features and frameworks that embrace that and higher order programming. And .Net core is removing a major annoyance by finally going more OS neutral.
I do hope this will prompt Google to make Go a first class option for Android. Swift worked out well for Apple. I know Java has it's fan, but the ones I talk still act like Sun is in charge of the platform. They aren't and it really shows. Oracle has been a terrible steward of Java and the Java platform. Even IBM was better, but not by much. I'm surprised that more Java programmers aren't frustrated by how things have been managed, but imagine most of them aren't aware of how competing languages are changing.
The Judge generally weighs the jury's ruling pretty strongly. I honestly thought the jury would rule against google. Juries tend to be very conservative and they tend to side first with property rights. Oracle had some fairly compelling arguments too. Ars has the slides they showed the jury and their slick as all hell get out. The fact that it was ruled you could copyright declarations kinda sucked too. Oracle now has an uphill fight on their hands.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I copied 1 line of subjects. It's undisputed. I took your subject, I copied it, and put it right into my post.
After this, if I still had my company, I wouldn't touch Java with a ten foot pole. I'd be at the whim of whatever Oracle executive failed to meet last quarter figures. Find a true unencumbered language and use that instead.
The news of SCO's death is greatly exaggerated. The case is still open.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Google won the battle but lost the war.
They win the war when they get Android off of Java. Then Oracle loses.
All their Java alternatives are not just the idle tinkering of a corp with too much money. I strongly suspect that after living with Java so long, they've learned to hate it with a depth of hatred similar to my hatred Verilog. They would love to be free of Java APIs and have the world use an API of their own creation. Is java2go or java2dart a thing?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Answering my own question:
https://github.com/kevoree/jav...
http://sma.github.io/stuff/jav...
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
That's awesome.
Now they just have to deal with Oracle spending out the ass on followup lawsuits on this to increase everyone's financial burden on this.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
tangentially interesting because when you're a juror you're instructed to do absolutely no research on your own. I'm in favor of well-informed judges though.
I am the very model of a modern major general!
I guess the only rejoinder to that is making sure the information juries are reviewing is neutral in nature, and in a case like this, that might be harder to obtain.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's great Google won and all, but fair use doesn't really protect the average developer. Fair use is an affirmative defense. In order to assert fair use, you have to get sued, refuse to settle, and then prove that your use is a fair use in a court of law. That will almost always get prohibitively expensive very quickly as this case has shown.
The real solutions is to make APIs not covered by copyright at all, like a directory listing or mathematical formula. I think Oracle should be able to copyright the implementation of Java, and obviously they have the right to restrict the use of the Java trademark, but the APIs should just be public domain.
According to Bloomberg,
Oracle Co-Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz invoked the Ten Commandments to characterize Google as acting above the law. Catz told jurors that, at a bat mitzvah in 2012, Google General Counsel Kent Walker told her, “You know, Safra, Google is this really special company, and the old rules don’t apply to us.”
“I immediately said, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’” Catz testified. “It’s an oldie but goodie.”
Wow. If that's true, then Kent Walker should learn to not say things like that - even in a non-business setting.
Hold on, where is the link to pledge allegiance to the superbrain?
There are four factors to consider when determining if the copying is "fair use":
... a work of the United States Government not subject to copyright protection.
1. Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
Google's use of the Java interfaces is to educate other pieces of code about what the implementation does. Interfaces are essentially documentative in nature, not creative...
2. Nature of the copyrighted work
Interfaces are not very creative. All they really do is document the input and output of an implementation. The implementation is where the creativity of the work is expressed.
3. Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
I bet the interfaces are less than 3% of the code base. If not, we have an over-architected language on our hands here..
4. Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
Oracle didn't lose a dime over this until they started paying lawyers to sue Google. If anything, Google's use of the Java interfaces made Java more valuable, because it brought more developers into the Java fold.
This comment shamelessly copies content from http://www.copyright.gov/fair-...
Microsoft's move to open source,and set free some very powerful programming tools, carries well into this story. Developers choose Java because it was believed to be free/open But as far as Oracle is concerned, it's not. I really do think .net core can fill this role now.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I don't think it means that. Google didn't just use the Java API: they re-implemented it. That is, they copied the definitions of the classes/functions/constants/etc. and then wrote new code to perform the actions for those definitions. For example, java.lang.String.valueOf() is a function that converts a value (e.g. a number) into a string. They copied the signature of the function, and then wrote new code to do the actual conversion.
Creating new implementations of existing API's happens pretty frequently in software development, but it's not something that is ever done lightly. API's are typically pretty big and complicated, and it's tricky to make sure that every single piece of the API works as intended.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd love to see IBM take a swing at this one, seeing as the original decision that allowed non-IBM PC-compatible machines to be created turned on the question of whether creating a BIOS that exposed the exact same interface as IBM's BIOS infringed on IBM's copyright if all other code could be proven to be entirely original. Under this decision the answer would be "Yes.", and IBM would be owed damages for every single PC created using a non-IBM BIOS that had any trace of the legacy BIOS API in it (at a minimum every BIOS that wasn't completely UEFI-only).
It might also be entertaining to analyze the effects of this ruling on Oracle's use of GPL- and LGPL-licensed glibc and kernel header files in their products that run on Linux. Neither license quite directly addresses the question of copying copyrighted API declarations into object files and executables. They address linking of various sorts, and copying into source code, but this particular aspect's deemed outside the scope of the license and thus not addressed.
I love these stories. It's like opening a box of Cracker Jack and finding a free random number in the bottom. It's never prime, however. It's always of the form p * q * r * s.
Why is it that any mention of copyright invokes the spectre of SCO. SCO has no case for a number of reasons. One of which is the courts have ruled that SCO has a lack of standing to sue since they didn't own the copyrights. Secondly, many of their claims were dismissed because they didn't follow court orders to specify exactly what their claims were. Lastly, the merits of their remaining claims were laughable at best.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Unfortunately yes. The judge base entered his judgement for dismissal under Rule 54 last month. Of course, SCO appealed.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
and yay
Google brought in Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz to tell the jury that Sun had already blessed Google's use of Java. Perhaps the jury believed Mr Schwartz's testimony.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Under which of the categories of fair use specified in the statute do you believe this use falls? Which of the statutory four criteria for how it is used apply, in opinion?
Let me guess, you had no idea that the statute lays out categories of use which are fair, and the conditions under which use within those categories may be fair. You couldn't guess what two of the categories are, much less articulate any cogent thoughts about how any of them applies to this case.
Rather, you're under the delusion that the law is whatever you wish it to be at the moment. This is not surprising, for two reasons. First, given that people with social deficiencies such as you have displayed tend also be be ignorant, to lack knowledge of the world around them. Second, the same ultra-selfcenteredness which allows you to think as though your desire for the law to be a certain way actually does make it so; this also makes it extremely difficult for such a person to converse in a civilized and respectful manner.
* The best arguments for fair use are under 107(3) and (4) - Java is more than just the APIs; and by being Java compatible, Android may increase, rather than decrease, the market for Java.
...in-house, hiring a mock jury of people from the street to sit and listen, with a good defense lawyer to mock-represent the Google side.
Then repeating over and over until juries are more often than not swayed in Oracle's favor, then with such sharpened arguments going for the real thing.
Kind of like how NASA went to the moon, except without any nobility in the endeavor.
You are right. The interesting issues were never tested, and now Oracle has corrected that. See, there's a purpose for every insect in the woods, even the roaches.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'd only use Java for Android and would stick with native Objective C for iOS, and keep as much of the logic in JSON RESTful webservices as I could get away with.
You won't be able to "get away with" much if an app needs to run offline, such as if it's for tablets that drift out of Wi-Fi often, phones whose data plan has been used up for the month, and devices carried on airplanes. You'll have to replicate most of the logic in an app that accesses a cached view of the data retrieved from your "JSON RESTful webservices".
And the reason Apache Harmony existed was as a credible "plan B" if Sun / Oracle started being dicks about open sourcing Java or excluding Apache from technology compatibility testing. When the OpenJDK became a thing, IBM switched to that, and Harmony basically fell by the wayside. But the implemented APIs found its way into Android.
And it wasn't the only implementation of the java.* APIs either. GNU Classpath was another one. And Kaffe had an implementation (albeit of an older Java). And in commercial-land there is Skelmir's CEE-J which was another impl that's still going. I had experience using CEE-J for set top box development and it was a delight especially since the "official" alternative was J2ME which sucked balls. But of course none of these efforts would have been worth suing for billions.
Google's "crime" was implementing an API (something which happens customarily all the time in computing) and having enough money to be worth suing. Fortunately they didn't take kindly to the shakedown and fought it out. Whatever you think of Google, this outcome is beneficial for everyone.
..are you criticising the previous poster. He has two Oracle v Google judgements backing up his opinion that it's fair use. Getting into the details is irrelevant.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Larry Ellison is a selfish hypocritical right wing fuck who was willing to wreck the entire software industry for his own personal gain.
Dude, chill. I think you're going overboard with this.
Oracle has to defend its business and it would be stupid for them not to go after the ginormous megacorp Google if they didn't see a chance of making a PR splash with the public and the shareholders. Everyone knows this was not about some silly and absurd 9 billion in damages Oracle was asking of Google.
Now Ellison can point to the lost Google case when business goes south for Oracle and Google wins out - even though this all had nothing to to with the case. The lawsuit is little more than a machiavellian smoke & mirror stunt to give Oracle some extra arguments vis-a-vis their inverstors. The case does have a lot of SCO smell to it and it was Sun who FOSSed Java, for the better or the worse - I doubt the Oracle experts or their legal dept. saw much of a chance of winning.
That's my impression anyway.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why? Because despite the very poor case that SCO had, the case drug on for years, refusing to go away. Despite loss after loss after loss the battle drug on.
That and that alone is why copyright cases invariably raise the spectre of SCO. The case that just would not die. Rumor had it that a Blade IV movie would have had Blade going after the ultimate Undead Creature of all time: SCO.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Except that /. didn't write the post. A user submitted the story based on an article. So either that user or the source of the article needs to eat crow. Not /. Don't shoot the messenger.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
What I wonder is, where does OpenJDK fall in all of this? I mean, seriously, the issue of API reimplementation is one thing, but OpenJDK pretty much does the same thing as Oracle's in most cases (but is free). From my understanding, Oracle isn't involved in OpenJDK itself.
Basically, OpenJDK is a lot more like Oracle's Java (but it isn't tied to a massive revenue stream like Android/Dalvik), so where's the lawsuit for that?
Well apparently the courts disagree. If they were wholesale copies, they would have come down on Google like a bag of bricks.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Was he the only republican? Was he typical in his (eventual) anti-slavery opinion? You really have to try to put that spin on it? Pathetic.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Different people have different opinions.
Citation needed.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
This is not the way that I would have liked this case to be won. But at least it allows Android to continue to exist in its current form.
What I really want is a legal principle: "APIs are not legally protectable." But then I also want the same principle for user interface. By "not legally protectable", I mean that any attempt to patent, copyright, or trademark things that fall into the categories of API or UI would be automatically rejected, and any that have already been granted would be considered invalid.
I'm willing to grant one exception. Each application should be allowed to have ONE (and exactly one) icon that it could trademark and copyright as a visual representation of that application. That would, for example, mean that no other application could use the Facebook icon to represent itself, or to represent any function in the application other than some form of interaction with Facebook.
Actually, IIRC, they didn't copy the signatures. When you build an android app, you use Oracle's JDK [and/or openJDK or some such] and get the signatures from that. Just like if you were using the JDK to create your own Java [non-Android] app. Otherwise, anybody writing Java code would be in the same boat.
Oracle has a copyright on the API. Oracle was trying to convert this to a "patent" on it. If Oracle had a patent [which they can't get], then Google would not have been able to create the underlying [Dalvik] from scratch re-implementation of the JVM.
If Oracle had won here, ironically, they would have had to open source the code to their database software. They port to Linux and it had GPL v2 [as does glibc, etc.]. Also, they use C, and the ISO C spec has a copyright.
If Oracle had won, anyone writing a C program would have had to make a royalty payment to ISO.
Further, the stdio.h that comes with glibc has a copyright. That doesn't prevent BSD from creating their own stdio.h [they are both built from scratch, even if they both define similar things to implement the POSIX specifications]. Actually, if Oracle had prevailed, all Linux implementations, gcc, glibc would be shut down because POSIX [specs] could never have existed. POSIX specs were a "clean room" reimplementation of the _specifications_ of interfaces and programs that had copyrights (i.e. AT&T had copyrights on the _Unix_ man pages for open/close/read/write and other system calls and utilities like ls/df/du, etc.)
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
SCO is more an example of a frivolous lawsuit rather than copyright claims. There are other examples of frivolous lawsuits: There was also the case of the the DC Court Judge who sued a dry cleaner for $67M for "losing his pants." Since the cleaner advertised "Satisfaction Guaranteed" on a sign, the Judge argued that mean he was entitled to $67M from the cleaner as he was not satisfied. He lost the case but appealed all the way to the Supreme Court; they did not hear his case as he did not complete all the necessary paperwork. That case would not be an example of contract terms and expectations.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.