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Oracle Will Officially Appeal Its 'Fair Use' Loss Against Google (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The massive Oracle v. Google litigation has entered a new phase, as Oracle filed papers (PDF) yesterday saying it will appeal its loss on "fair use" grounds to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. For a brief recap of the case: after Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems and acquired the rights to Java, it sued Google in 2010, saying that Google infringed copyrights and patents related to Java. The case went to trial in 2012. Oracle initially lost but had part of its case revived on appeal. The sole issue in the second trial was whether Google infringed the APIs in Java, which the appeals court held are copyrighted. In May, a jury found in Google's favor after a second trial, stating that Google's use of the APIs was protected by "fair use." Oracle's appeal is no surprise, but it will be a long shot. The four-factor "fair use" test is a fairly subjective one, and Oracle lawyers will have to argue that the jury's unanimous finding must be overturned. There are various ways a jury could arrive at the conclusion that Google was protected by fair use. The case will go back to the Federal Circuit, the same appeals court that decided APIs could be copyrighted in the first place. That decision overruled U.S. District Judge William Alsup, the lower court judge, and was extremely controversial in the developer community. However, the same decision that insisted APIs can be copyrighted clearly held the door open to the idea that "fair use" might apply. Unless Oracle pulls off a stunning move on appeal, its massive legal expenditures in this case will be for naught.
If you're willing to judge ~130,000 employees based on your perception of what's right or not, it wont mean much.
Some of us are doing pretty cool stuff at Oracle and if you can navigate large corporations (there _Was_ a learning curve when we got acquired in 2001), it's actually a great place to work at. Most of us have families that live well because Oracle treats it's employees right, unlike some corporations where some friends of mine work.
The employees, such as coders (as yours truly), dont get to decide what judicial courts decide, nor where Oracle points it's legal department. So unloading your frustration at it's employees wont accomplish much.
How would that work? Open source is firmly grounded in copyright law - how could granting an extremely permissive, non-revokable license with clear and specific reciprocity demands possibly be found to run afoul of US law, without simultaneously destroying all other copyright licensing arrangements as well?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I'm an ex-oracle employee. I resigned in protest over this lawsuit when it was first launched.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *