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Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google (bloomberg.com)
Google could owe Oracle billions of dollars after an appeals court said it didn't have the right to use the Oracle-owned Java programming code in its Android operating system on mobile devices. From a report: Google's use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle's copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled. The case was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet unit should pay.
The dispute is over pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIs, which can work across different types of devices and provide the instructions for things like connecting to the internet or accessing certain types of files. By using the APIs, programmers don't have to write new code from scratch to implement every function in their software or change it for every type of device. The case has divided Silicon Valley for years, testing the boundaries between the rights of those who develop interface code and those who rely on it to develop software programs.
The dispute is over pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIs, which can work across different types of devices and provide the instructions for things like connecting to the internet or accessing certain types of files. By using the APIs, programmers don't have to write new code from scratch to implement every function in their software or change it for every type of device. The case has divided Silicon Valley for years, testing the boundaries between the rights of those who develop interface code and those who rely on it to develop software programs.
FFS... we need a special court for tech cases.
Too much money and power in play.
This could take decades.
The dispute is over pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIs, which can work across different types of devices and provide the instructions for things like connecting to the internet or accessing certain types of files. By using the APIs, programmers don't have to write new code from scratch to implement every function in their software or change it for every type of device.
Have I completely misunderstood this case or has Bloomberg?
They certainly are working hard to kill Java. Besides the lawsuits, Oracle also gives Java lousy support and upgrade options. Few companies can make Microsoft seem the less evil alternative (C-sharp/.NET), and Oracle is one of them.
Table-ized A.I.
A ruling in Oracle's favor would shut down the ability to use Wine to run Windows-exclusive applications on your Mac because Microsoft could assert copyright in the Windows API against the Wine developers. Is that an outcome that you find helpful to the economy?
The danger is in the precedent. If they recognize function headers as protected by copyright law then writing any drop in library will become a licencing nightmare. Who owns "int round(float)" anyway?
This is way bigger than Java and Android.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
It's true that without the large number of Java programmers around, Android would not have had nearly as fast a rate of adoption as far as application creation went.
So? API's aren't copyright-able. Linux wouldn't exist if they were. This was settled ages ago. It's only Oracle's ability to fund the caliber of lawyers necessary to engineer an appeal that is keeping this alive. It's really just a reflection of our corrupt pay to win judicial system.
You have to nothing to receive a copyright. It is granted to you automatically and under current law the copyright it is yours for 175 years. For the entire 60 year history of computers everyone has believed that APIs can not be copyrighted.
What happens if Oracle manages to change this?
The computer industry is going to collapse into utter legal chaos that it will likely never recover from. That's because if you make Oracle's API have a copyright then that ruling is going to apply to every API in existence since they are all still under copyright. Think about it -- consider how many APIs have been reimplemented over and over. Ownership of SQL is going to revert back to IBM allowing IBM to demand royalties from everyone using SQL. The C run-time API (like printf) is going to revert back to AT&T as owning it. What about Posix? What about game emulators? This will result in total legal chaos in the computer industry.
C# would actually be a good language, if it weren't completely Microsoft-specific. Microsoft obviously analyzed all the common errors C++ programmers make, and tried to create a language in which those mistakes weren't possible. Combined with Managed Code, it allows them to develop more reliable software with worse programmers.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A win for Oracle here will means utter chaos in the computer industry. Copyright is automatic and it lasts under current law for about 175 years. Based on this every API ever developed on a computer would suddenly become under copyright law. Think about that. SQL would be under copyright. The C run-time library would be under copyright. Game emulators, Samba, Wine, there are thousands of entries in the list. And every one of those is going to blow up into a legal fight.
int round(float) would likely end up being owned by AT&T who would then have the legal right to charge royalties for its use.
Patents are already doing enough damage to the computer industry in America. If you want to totally destroy the American tech industry, API copyright is the way to do it.
This doesn't matter anymore. Google are no longer the good guys who need to be defended. Now that they've abandoned "don't be evil" they're just another tech titan. Let 'em battle it out with their fellow evildoer.
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The only part of Oracle Java that Google copied is the function signatures. It has been unequivocally proven over the years that nothing else was copied. And of course Google copied the function signatures (ie the API) sincethere is no way to make software compatible without copying the function signatures.
Since the only possible avenue to cloning is by copying the function signatures, Alsop and the jury rules this fair use.
Oracle's current case hinges on making it a copyright violation to clone the function signatures. And the problem with doing that is if they win suddenly every cloned API in the history of computing is going to turn into a copyright infringement. And the lawyers of the world will declare a week of celebration before they all become billionaires.
And if Oracle wins, they'll sue your ass because you're simply copying the Java API and replicating it in HTML.
In the case of Android, Oracle should win. Early Android essentially was Java. It's more flagrant than Compaq copying IBM's BIOS. (Yes, they claimed they made a functional equivalent in a "clean room" way where there was no chance of actual copying and won in court. Everyone knows that's total bullshit.)
I just wish they could both lose. Java continues to be awful and Oracle continues to sit on its fat ass about it. It's fundamentally the same mess that they inherited from Sun.
A ruling in Oracle's favor would shut down the ability to use Wine to run Windows-exclusive applications on your Mac
First of all, I question if this is really true. It's a different case because it presents a way for executables to make system calls that work, it's not the same as an API specific to a programming language. It is very similar, I grant you that.
99.9% of WINE is the re-implementation of Microsoft libraries, just like Google reimplemented the Java libraries. There is no difference. You could just as well call the JVM an operating system, which in several ways it is.
Also, WINE is not making any money, whereas Google has made a ton of money from Android.
Most of the WINE developers are employed by CodeWeavers, which sells a commercialised version of WINE.
Double also, Microsoft benefits from people being able to run Windows applications in more places, because it encourages more Windows development.
Microsoft is trying to transforming itself into an advertising platform. Everyone that runs Windows applications without sending in as much usage data as possible to Microsoft is a loss for Microsoft.
Lastly though, I have to say think it would be awful to lose WINE. But the question is, would it be wrong?
The "commercial/exploitation rights" part of copyright are a tool to encourage innovation and competition (at least in jurisdictions that distinguish between the moral and the exploitation rights; in the US, the whole shebang is enshrined as intended to advance the useful arts etc). I don't see how extending them to cover APIs would help that.
Donate free food here
The decades of embrace, extend, and extinguish have made many wary of MS adoption. The other extreme is how MS suddenly abandons things leaving developers anxious. For example any developer that bet on Windows Phone is not getting much on return.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And not much written in java is particularly long lived anyway.
Looks at CVS repo with commits with Java code as old as 1996 that is still running in production...
I work on helping third-parties integration with our APIs, and a lot of our customers are using Java Struts early-2000s code. You greatly underestimate how quickly companies replace working code.
"Why is that the case?"
First of all, look at the can of worms it opens.
Time SetTime(hr, mm, ss, ms)
That's an API. For creating some sort of 'time' construct, initialized by using a method called SetTime, and passing it the hour, minute, second, and milliseconds.
class Object {
boolean equals(Object o)
}
That's an API, you have an object, and it has an equals method, that compares itself to another object and returns a boolean based on their equivalence.
The minute you rule that an API is protected by copyright, someone gets to claim ownership of that API. And every other language, library, or tool that came afterwards is in violation.
" most languages these days are only powerful because of extensive libraries and API's"
If APIs are protected by copyright, then not only is an exact duplicate protected, then a 'derivative work' is also protected.
Most APIs for similar things are quite similar. Whether I'm using Java or Python or C# or C++ the various standard and even 3rd party APIs for for a List container, or for a Button widget are very similar, often identical. The lists all have an 'add' method, and a 'contains' method. The button has a position. size, label and property and a clicked event handler. Even when they aren't identical, surely they are clearly related -- and i could easily argue that your button api that came after mine is a derivative work ... look how similar they are.
Why it's almost like they are similar on purpose! Someone owes me a billion dollars!
Further; identical APIs are particularly useful as drop in replacements to correct buggy or crufty or non-performant or legacy solutions. We have openGL wrappers for directX, directX wrappers for OpenGL, we have 3DFX glide wrappers that allow old 3dfx games to run hardware accelerated on modern hardware. All these 'wrappers' exist to allow software written to one API to be used without modification on a 'new backend'. If companies can own and assert copyright on the API, then API wrappers cannot exist.
If you write some software against some 3rd party library, and then years later want to change the backend out, you can rebuild the software to a new API, or you can write a wrapper class for the old code to call that translates it to the new backend. The new backend has its own API. But the wrapper class is effectively a re-implementation of the original API.
It's classic software design pattern: "the Adapter pattern"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Aside from Adapters, lots of people have written initially against 'standard library' or 3rd party library functionality; and then later gone back and dropped in custom built optimized-for-their-needs solutions to those libraries. That's usually done by building against the original/standard/3rd party API and then re-implementing the API you need with your own custom stuff later on, as you need it, if you need it.
Then we have projects like WINE which implements Windows API, FreeDOS which implements the DOS API. We have all manner of 'plugin architectures' that function in like ways, but that constitutes an API. We have chip emulators that emulate the hardware API. We have hypervisors that emulate certain hardware API. We have virtual devices that emulate the physical device APIs. We have all kinds of software bits to run cpu instructions in software on chips that lack hardware support -- that's API.
The Browser DOM is an API, and the web would be very different if browser vendors could have simply asserted that other browser vendors couldn't include their DOM extensions.
Software engineering and software development has spent the last several decades under the assumption that this was all ok, because it WAS ok. It's ludicrous to change the game now. This doesn't just affect Google vs Oracle and the implementation on Android.
Changing the rules on what you can do with an API rewrites the software industry.