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Op-ed: Oracle Attorney Says Google's Court Victory Might Kill the GPL (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the the-other-side-of-the-coin dept.

Annette Hurst, an attorney at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe who represented Oracle in the recent Oracle v. Google trial, has written an opinion piece for Ars Technica in which she urges developers and creators to not celebrate Google's win in the hard-fought copyright case as the decision -- if remains intact -- is poised to make them "suffer" everywhere and also the free software movement itself "now faces substantial jeopardy." As you're aware, in a verdict earlier this week, a federal court announced that Google's Android operating system didn't infringe on Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by "fair use." Hurst writes: No business trying to commercialize software with any element of open software can afford to ignore this verdict. Dual licensing models are very common and have long depended upon a delicate balance between free use and commercial use. Royalties from licensed commercial exploitation fuel continued development and innovation of an open and free option. The balance depends upon adherence to the license restrictions in the open and free option. This jury's verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming "fair use." It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.

15 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple Award Winning by dcollins · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Best Sour Grapes of May 2016"

    "Best Nail in Coffin for Confidence in Legal Judgement"

    --
    We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
    1. Re:Multiple Award Winning by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Funny

      Let me rephrase the lawyer's text into something more comprehensible to the masses:

      Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense! Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!

      Look at me. I'm a lawyer working for a multibillion dollar software company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, Google's victory will destroy the GPL!

    2. Re:Multiple Award Winning by solidraven · · Score: 5, Insightful

      API description doesn't equal actual code though. So yeah this is a lot of drama for a list of supported functions and methods essentially. The majority of the work (the code behind the API) is still protected. So bugger off.

    3. Re:Multiple Award Winning by phayes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, the point the lawyer for Oracle is trying to make is a distinction that does not exist.

      Oracle has been trying to make a case that API=Code so others cannot copy their API's without a licence. For everyone else on the planet, API!=code and APIs are free to use ether because they are not copyrightable (as the judge originally ruled and I agree with personally) or because they are fair use.

      Now that the Java APIs used in Android have been determined by the jury to have been fair use, Oracle is now attempting to make the case that because (in their opinion) API=Code, if APIs are fair use then so is ALL code, including the GPL.

      Nobody except Oracle & co believe that API=Code so the woman has no point.

      --
      Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
  2. They don't know what they're talking about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's the implementations that they're protecting with the GPL, not the interfaces.

    1. Re:They don't know what they're talking about by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's the implementations that they're protecting with the GPL, not the interfaces.

      She is a lawyer, not a programmer. What she is saying is nonsense, but it is grammatically correct, and succinctly encapsulates Oracle's outrage at the verdict.

    2. Re:They don't know what they're talking about by WarJolt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      She is a lawyer, not a programmer. What she is saying is nonsense, but it is grammatically correct, and succinctly encapsulates Oracle's outrage at the verdict.

      No where near as outraged as all the OSS developers are at all of Oracle's patent trolling over the years, so what was she thinking trying to co-opt them?

      We love copyright law, you're not going to beat us at our own game. Oracle should stick to abusing patent law. They'll still lose. Now they also look like idiots.

    3. Re:They don't know what they're talking about by Dahamma · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, that doesn't make sense, and it doesn't change anything. It's not about libraries, it's about interfaces. You could create you own library using the same function names/signatures, but you can't use someone else's code beyond that.

  3. Losing Attorney is BSing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There never was copyright on the interface code as it is required to function. This was about Oracle bean counters trying to make their balance sheet look better through shenanigans rather than actually doing real work.

    This case was not about the core code which is still covered fine by copyright and the GPL.

    These comments are just spin.

    1. Re:Losing Attorney is BSing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      These comments are just spin.

      Precisely. We don't need some ignorant attorney telling us, the ones who write the code, what our business or interests are regarding software. We don't need copyright to help us share or get paid for our work. She doesn't get it. The GPL was a hack of the copyright laws designed to prevent legal interference in the affairs of the open source movement and to neutralize a legal weapon so that it couldn't be used against us to prevent sharing. It was not necessary to enable sharing. If copyright did not exist, software would still be shared freely and the GPL would have been largely unnecessary. There have been a few minor incidents where copyright law was used successfully to force sharing of GPL code from an otherwise unwilling party, but in my opinion none of these cases revealed anything but banal or poorly written additions to the original GPL code, certainly nothing of lasting importance that wouldn't have been shared otherwise. To summarize, copyright is mostly a hindrance and rarely a help to the open source movement. The GPL mostly exists to ensure that a-hole attorneys, like Annette Hurst, leave us alone. We share code because we ourselves benefited from that sharing when we were learning our craft and it would be an act of disrespect and deep ingratitude to refuse to reciprocate when the time came.

  4. Bullshit by somenickname · · Score: 5, Informative

    Re-implementing an API and wholesale lifting a GPL software package are not even vaguely related. And, the end part of her quote, where she proclaims doom and gloom if we don't all move to the cloud, is ponderous hyperbole. The is just scare tactic garbage from an attorney who wants to bait the waters before she takes on the appeal and charges Oracle millions of dollars for the privilege.

    1. Re:Bullshit by dwywit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. "

      I think it's less hyperbole and more a sign of what Oracle is considering. She's let the cat out of the bag - Oracle must be exploring options to charge even more for their products.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  5. Stallman's defense of Oracle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oracle's loss is a huge threat to free software and the GPL. That's why Stallman has been campaigning on their behalf for years now, hanging out with Ellison on his private catamaran, writing op-ed pieces supporting Oracle's treatment of Java post-Sun acquisition, etc.

    I'd post the links, but it's easy enough to find them with Google.

  6. Complete utter nonsense! by Xtifr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before Oracle v. Google, everyone assumed (based on extensive legal precedent) that APIs were not subject to copyright at all. Yet the GPL was just fine. Why would the GPL be threatened all of a sudden just because one more API turned out to be copyable?

    The only tangible result of this case has been a very slight strengthening of copyrights, since the appeals court rules that APIs might be copyrightable under certain circumstances. How does strengthening copyright weaken a license that relies on copyright?

    This is either monumental stupidity, or outright shilling. Hanlon's razor suggests I ought to go with the former, but I'm going to wait and see.

  7. Re: Oracle wants us to have crappy computers. by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 5, Informative

    IBM's BIOS was not reverse engineered. The commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS is published in the Technical Reference Manual which anybody could purchase.

    Phoenix had to hire programmers to read the IBM source, write a human language specification, then hand that specification over to a seperate team to code their version of BIOS. Anybody on the first team, or anybody who had access to and read the published IBM source code was disqualified to work on the reimplementation.

    In other words, IBM published their BIOS in commented human readable source code. The PC was in this regard among others, an open architecture.