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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.
I know people who are actively *NOT* buying Oracle because of stupid lawsuits.
But maybe Larry doesn't care anymore, he has enough money to play, and can't spend it all before he dies.
Weird.
FFS... we need a special court for tech cases.
Too much money and power in play.
This could take decades.
On the one side you have the engineers that rely on APIs to Get Stuff Done, on the assumption that that's why the APIs exist. On the other side you have the 1% parasites who realize "oops, somebody took our work and made billions off it. Bring in the lawyers!"
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?
Of all the bad laws being thought up in the EU, at least they got the API copyright decision correct.
APIs are not copyright-able in the EU according to their highest court.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/eus-top-court-apis-cant-be-copyrighted-would-monopolise-ideas
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.
I used to work for Oracle. They are much, much worse! My manager pulled down his $40K/quarter bonus by billing customers for work that wasn't actually done.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Oracle claims Google was in such a rush in the mid-2000s to create an operating system for mobile devices that the company used key parts of copyrighted Java technology without paying royalties.
If this is true, it certainly isnt happening again. Google dominates smartphones and could very easily decide to phase out java for go/rust, torpedoing whatever rent-seeking strategy Oracle had originally devised. What oracle is attempting to do is nothing short of what Microsoft tried to do with TomTom's implementation of FAT. If BTRFS, percona, and maria are any indication its not the work that matters. Plenty of talented engineers are willing to devote their time and effort to avoiding Oracle. Quite frankly the Oracle Database has turned into a manacle for Ellison. Unable to prevent its inevitable loss to open source alternatives through NDA agreements that prohibit public release of independent Oracle performance tests, and unable to convince cloud-bound companies to continue forking out high dollar per-core licenses for it, The software exists as a 90s anachronism to the hubris of dotcom. Oracle Enterprise Linux was, for all its intentions, a flop, and after acquisition and rebranding MySQL is a withered husk compared to its open source counterparts.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Larry has his own private Hawaiian island to retire to... if I were him, I would retire already!
If Larry were you, he'd probably say that if he were Larry he'd retire.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It's all about copyright, correct? Copyright only applies to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not protected. APIs only provide context for calling functions and passing parameters. They, themselves, do not perform any function but merely describe how the function should be called.
The original ruling was mistaken. Google's use was not Fair Use. What was copied wasn't subject to copyright to begin with. Google used Java APIs but wrote the code behind the APIs. Oracle invented a new copyrightable thing, Structure, Sequence, and Organization. There is nothing in law to support this view.
IANAL but I think this decision is pretty binary - Alsop originally ruled that APIs could not be copyright. Oracle forced him to change that ruling to API could be copyright but cloning them is fair use. But now Oracle is trying to reverse the fair use ruling by the jury.
If that happens all APIs will be under copyright and the only way to clone them will be with a license. And since those copyrights are going to get constructed retroactively since the dawn of computers the only possible outcome is total legal chaos.
Few companies can make Microsoft seem the less evil alternative (C-sharp/.NET), and Oracle is one of them.
Microsoft has open sourced the core of .NET under an MIT license, plus a patent grant. It's not hard to seem more evil than that...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Then whistleblow. Call the company that Oracle defrauded and let them file criminal charges against oracle and your old boss. Then make some popcorn.
But that value of an API is created not by the company that created the APIs but by the companies that invest their time and money in using the APIs.
In the case of Sun/Oracle, there are three additional factors to consider: (1) Sun achieved rapid and widespread adoption of Java's APIs by falsely claiming that they would make those APIs an open standard; that is, Java APIs would not have succeeded in the market if Sun had been clear from the beginning that they would not allow compatible third party implementations; (2) large parts of the Java APIs were not even developed by Sun or were copied from other APIs; (3) Sun/Oracle has a long history of building their products on other people's APIs.
Why should Google have to pay Sun/Oracle anything? That's like saying that authors need to pay Merriam/Webster/Oxford for using words.
The main problem with this case is that Google have never adequately explained what an API is. If you read the original testimony/filings and decision, the definition of what an API is is laughably vague, and as a result none of the lawyers know what they are fighting about. The correct definition of an API in copyright terms is a "blank form", that requires that you fill in certain information in certain boxes and deliver the form to a specified location for processing. The entity doing the processing might return information to you, or might take other actions on your behalf. The name of the function determines the address to deliver the form, and the parameters are the form fields, along with a calling convention which defines how those are interpreted. An ABI is similar, except already converted into binary/machine readable format by the compiler. This is more obvious on the web, where APIs are implemented using web forms, even if no form is displayed to the user.
This correct definition would have helped Google tremendously, because blank forms are specifically not protected by copyright law, after having been found to be not copyright-able by the Supreme Court. Oracle's SSO claims would also be seen for what they are - like claiming that organizing the forms in a bank or post-office in a particular way (in this case alphabetically) has some inherent value.
"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.
Sun and later Oracle were so fixated on the nonfunctional J2ME stack that they didn't see Google coming. Sun had the skeleton of what later became Android with the SavaJe acquisition but didn't have the funds or desire to make it happen. They (and later Oracle) failed to adequately invest in mobile and now Google has. Larry is simply pissed that someone other than himself is making money on something he neglected to capitalize on. To Lawsuit Larry, that's a crime - to anyone else, it's called business.
Organization? You must be joking..
Then R.I.P. Java. It is too dangerous to develop new software if APIs suddenly acquire copyright protection because the licensing terms effectively change and could impact your business. At this point to run a business responsibly you should negotiate up front what your license terms for tools, compilers and APIs should be. Going with platforms, tools and languages that are open licensed is going to be necessary for many businesses that don't have the resources to wrestle with licenses, lawyers and sales staff with complex licensing payment terms.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's like someone patented the Oxford Comma and by extension the works of anyone who has ever used one. A programming language is very similar to a written/spoken language, an API is very similar to a grammatical style or tone of voice - it contains no substance in itself, it does nothing in itself, it's just a thing which is required to exist - everything that interacts with anything has them and there is nothing novel in the API of anything - it is literally an interface by which the thing interacts. In a more fuzzy logic/business arena: if you can control any API you write then suddenly everyone who uses your platform is effectively working for you without being paid and is forbidden from reusing anything they themselves wrote elsewhere without effectively starting over from scratch to change the style in which it was written.
What Google made was a Java-compatible runtime.
Oracle claims that making it compatible, using the same interface, is unlawful.
Consider anything that uses any kind of network protocol, serial, protocol, etc. If Oracle wins, the precedent is that it's unlawful to make an accessory compatible with any device which uses a non-standard protocol, because you'd be copying interface, just as Google copied the interface to Java.