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Oracle Refuses To Accept Android's 'Fair Use' Verdict, Files Appeal (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Wall Street Journal:
The seven-year legal battle between tech giants Google and Oracle just got new life. Oracle on Friday filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that seeks to overturn a federal jury's decision last year... The case has now gone through two federal trials and bounced around at appeals courts, including a brief stop at the U.S. Supreme Court. Oracle has sought as much as $9 billion in the case.
In the trial last year in San Francisco, the jury ruled Google's use of 11,000 lines of Java code was allowed under "fair use" provisions in federal copyright law. In Oracle's 155-page appeal on Friday, it called Google's "copying...classic unfair use" and said "Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters."
Oracle's brief also argues that "When a plagiarist takes the most recognizable portions of a novel and adapts them into a film, the plagiarist commits the 'classic' unfair use."
In the trial last year in San Francisco, the jury ruled Google's use of 11,000 lines of Java code was allowed under "fair use" provisions in federal copyright law. In Oracle's 155-page appeal on Friday, it called Google's "copying...classic unfair use" and said "Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters."
Oracle's brief also argues that "When a plagiarist takes the most recognizable portions of a novel and adapts them into a film, the plagiarist commits the 'classic' unfair use."
Use some other language. There are better languages out there.
Sun, which developed Java, made it freely available so that it would get popular. That's why people chose it -- that's why it got the traction and support to evolve to where it is today. Ultimately though, people were only willing to pay what it was worth.
Wasn't Java open source at some point? And besides why is anybody using it now? (Here's looking at you Libre/OpenOffice) Rewrite Android in C, or better, Assembly, and the problem is solved.
Wikipedia's entry, has this to say as intro:
OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE).[1] It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) version 2 with a linking exception. Were it not for the GPL linking exception, components that linked to the Java class library would be subject to the terms of the GPL license. OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7
There is a post here on StackOverflow on this: http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
My cynical side feels whatever the reality is, this is Oracle and well lets just say that I haven't ever felt Oracle to be a community player, unless that involves providing consults at cost.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Google reaped billions of dollars while leaving Oracle's Java business in tatters.
What Oracle Java business? Or do they mean the one about trying to extort money from others using public APIs?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
In many ways this case bears some remarkable similarities with the case brought by "The SCO Group" [a successor-in-interest, *not* the original Santa Cruz Operation company] against IBM, claiming not only that IBM had violated "TSG"-owned copyright, but that because in their view TSG owned the rights to code that IBM were alleged to have copied into Linux, somehow this gave TSG the right to charge every Linux user a "license fee" for the use of this unspecified code.
The exact same greed lies behind the Oracle case against Google. No matter how ludicrous the case might seem to us as technologists, the plaintiff in this case [Oracle], with their dying business model, is asking a court to allow them to charge a "tax" on every Android device in the same way that The SCO Group sought to tax every user of the Linux kernel.
To be fair, there are some important distinctions between the two cases. In TSG vs. IBM, the plaintiff flat-out refused to identify [let alone with the specificity requested by IBM] the actual code they were alleged to have copied. In their hope of getting in front of a jury and having their star lawyer [David Boies] pull some fast talking, TSG refused to specifying, saying basically, "The infringing code is in the Linux Kernel. Go look for yourselves..." With Oracle vs. Google, the "code" is precisely identified.
However, *unlike* the TSG case, Oracle are taking exception to Android's use of the "language structure" of JAVA, which of course Google did to ensure compatibility with existing applications. This is interesting because of the potential legal repercussions of this case and not just because this is two of the biggest names in US Technology duking it out in a court of law. Oracle are trying to argue that the structure of JAVA can be subject to copyright. To put that in context, that is like saying that a publisher could copyright a book structure that comprised of:-
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
and so on... Lay the issue out in such a simple form and it seems a bit absurd, but we would do well to remember that "the law may upset reason, but reason may not upset the law..." (Ieyasu Tokugawa, the Shogun of Japan). This is both important and scary for us as technologists, because it means that if someone can convince a jury that they "own" a data model or data structure that might be self-evident to us, they might get the right to ask for damages sufficient to bring down not just companies, but entire industries.
The funny-if-you-can-look-at-it-that-way observation to make is that Oracle are not the only company gunning for Android. Microsoft have already threatened multiple smart-phone manufacturers with patent infringements, claiming that some portion or other of Android violates some of their intellectual property. Unfortunately, deals struck in those cases always include a confidentiality clause, so we don't yet know what Microsoft have been using to extract their pound of flesh. But it does seem remarkable to me that Microsoft appear to have been more successful by attacking the hardware developers than attempting to go after Google, while Oracle have tried that and now lost multiple times.
Let's hope that Oracle and not permitted get away with what looks for all the world like a shake-down...