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.
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.
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.
Google Music used to have so many ads that it was unusable. They even ran ads saying "Don't like the ads! Subscribe for advertisement free music!". After I listened to that for a day, I deleted the app and did not try it again for two years. A few months ago I gave it try during an outage on another music service and the obnoxious ads were gone. So now I am using it again for background music. My new complaint -- the channel playlists are way, way too short before they endlessly repeat the same songs over and over. When you finish the playlist on a channel, why can't it just randomly play similar songs instead of looping the same playlist? Randomly playing songs has a very low royalty compared to on-demand.
The lesson here -- obnoxious ads work to drive your customers away. But they may be more likely to go to a competitor than your own pay service.
I would prefer to see a short 20 years period which would quickly separate out public domain stuff that people don't care about. That's the whole orphan work problem -- after a work is 50 years old it becomes almost impossible to track down the copyright holders and ask for permission.
Then maybe move to 10 year renewals at something along the lines of $1000, $5000, $10000, $15000, etc. Note that Disney probably has 100,000 works they want to keep protected. They are going to have to pay a renewal fee on each of those. Everything from movies to coloring books to costumes to dolls. We're not trying to make it impossible for Disney, just make it harder. Clearly Disney will keep paying these fees for movies with multi-million dollar investments, but they will probably stop paying them on lesser items like a coloring book.
You also need to consider the music industry. I want to set things up so that most 30 year old music will become public domain. Sure the big rights holders will renew the fees on the big hits, but millions of lesser tracks will fall into the public domain - unlike the current situation where 99% of all recorded music is locked up. The goal here is to push 40 year old works that generate $5,000 or less in annual revenue out into the public domain instead of leaving them locked up and maybe selling a few copies a year - if any.
Also note that the payment database creates an authoritative record of what is protected and what isn't.
This 150 years automatically for free is ridiculous. Copyright works turn into culture after a while. We can't have our entire culture being owned. Consider that photos and recordings of WWII will be under copyright until after most of us are dead.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
The root of SF's problems is decades of government interference in the housing market. Adam Smith's invisible hand would sort everything out if the government would stop holding it back. Market forces work at all levels, if there are not enough restaurants to satisfy demand prices will rise and workers will get paid more. Everything falls apart when people in the government think they are smarter than the invisible hand and enact laws supporting their social agendas. There is an obvious correlation in America with city governments that interfere with the housing market and problems in those same cities with housing the poor. In general the more the government interferes to worse it gets for the majority of the poor, select segments of the poor benefit from government interference, but those not selected get hurt a lot more.
Great, then the owners of those restaurants will have to pay their workers more!
No area is going to lose all of their restaurants, etc. There is always demand for services like that. Prices will adjust and employee pay will increase. Restaurant workers in NYC already get paid triple what a restaurant worker in Alabama gets.
Why is this a bad thing? It is called capitalism. Should we build a moat around NYC and keep out all of the people willing to pay more for housing in order to protect cheap rents for people already inside the moat?
I really do get annoyed at people that try and use the government and legal system to force property owners into giving them below market rents. Haven't we learned that is a good way to turn decent neighborhoods into slums? In some cases rent control laws have reach such idiotic proportions that the landlord is actually paying the tenant to live in the unit since the rent doesn't cover the property taxes.
Let supply and demand function without interference in order to establish a market level price.
The compensation paid by Uber/Lyft for doing a ride should include enough profit to cover some down-time and deadheading to the next pick up. So if you stay busy you will get enough padding to cover reasonable gap between your rides. But if you just turn the app on and don't pay attention to it, you won't be getting anything to cover down-time.
That is how existing taxis work. The drivers pays a flat fee for the 24hr rental. If he does one fare in 24hrs he won't make anything, if he does 30 fares he makes a lot. If the cabby has too much downtime he does get enough excess profit to pay him for his down time.that
If Uber paid to simply have the app on, they would end up with way too many drivers active relative to demand. What's to stop a thousand drivers from leaving the app on while they sleep for eight hours. There will be a few drivers awake that service that demand, the rest will be able to earn minimum wage while they sleep. They might even sort themselves into groups to support this scam.
Taxi drivers pay the taxi cab company to rent the taxi in 24hr blocks. What they do with it during the 24 hrs is their own business. Taxi drivers are independent contractors not employees. If a taxi driver is idling for a fare, that's because he chose to not because his employer made him do it.
Retail clerks have assigned tasks to do when no customers are present. How do you think the stores get restocked and who refolds everything when someone messes it all up? Who does inventory, who cleans the restroom, etc....
For sure we can legally classify gig workers as employees, downside to doing that is that there will be a whole lot fewer gig jobs available. So that may end up being good for 10% of the current workers and really bad for the other 90%. My two cents is that a third legal classification is needed. Gig workers don't cleanly fit into either of the two existing classifications.
A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
This is part of the argument the employee rights people try to make, they want people to be paid minimum wage just for turning the app on. But that immediately falls apart because drivers often log into Uber and Lyft simultaneously. Should they get double minimum wage for logging in twice? And what about bad actors taking advantage of this? Doing the minimum of number of runs need to stay on as a driver and then collecting most of their income simply from having the app on all of the time.
So two people can look at the same data and come up with widely different views of what the hourly wage is.
Via car Google maps quotes 21 minutes form my house to Harvard Square. Via mass transit the estimate is an hour and 45 minutes. Plus I have to wait 45 minutes before I can start the trip. This is because it is impossible to do the trip on mass transit without a transfer.
In Boston try one-way on commuter rail $7.50 plus $2.25 for the subway. Round trip is $20-25 depending on destination. Uber Pool is cheaper than mass transit if you need to travel to the suburbs. Plus it is door to door. Of course mass transit is cheaper with a monthly pass, but it is still not cheap.
Mass transit is of limited use. It is a pain when you have to do a transfer or your destination is a long ways from a stop. I can easily see Uber which offers door to door service pulling people off from a mass transit system that doesn't really go where they need it to.
Boston also has a special problem of the north commuter rail system not being connected to the south one. So if you have to cross this boundary it forces a transfer onto the subway. Subway and commuter rail are separate systems and require two fares. When you add this up, an Uber Pool is definitely price competitive.
I think a lot of rural people would choose to have an unsafe bridge their kids cross on the way to school fixed before getting subsidized broadband. And there are an awful lot of those unsafe bridges in rural America.
Here lies there conceptual problem: "My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies knowing that it assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted by AOM for use in its video codec."
He simply doesn't get network effects. It is not 'thanks' that you get by putting the technology into a free pool, when everyone does this it creates a broad and compatible market for everyone to sell into. The only group that does not benefit from this are the NPEs since they don't sell anything.
Look at all of the technology going into Linux and tell me the only thing people are getting out of Linux is 'thanks'. Royalties are not the only way to make money (unless you are a NPE).
You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
This Russian ad spend was on the order of a few hundred thousands dollars. A couple hundred thousand does nothing when applied to large numbers of people. Put into perspective that the candidates spent two billion dollars.
You can then try to make the argument that the Russians highly focused the ads on to a specific target group. But that rapidly turns into preaching to the choir. It is easy to get a highly targeted group to do what the ads imply, that is simply because they were very likely to do whatever it was anyway. But there is no way that 700,000 people is a tightly selected group like that.
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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.
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.
OpenJDK came along later
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.
You are purchasing plenty from Google -- you pay with your personal data.
Google Music used to have so many ads that it was unusable. They even ran ads saying "Don't like the ads! Subscribe for advertisement free music!". After I listened to that for a day, I deleted the app and did not try it again for two years. A few months ago I gave it try during an outage on another music service and the obnoxious ads were gone. So now I am using it again for background music. My new complaint -- the channel playlists are way, way too short before they endlessly repeat the same songs over and over. When you finish the playlist on a channel, why can't it just randomly play similar songs instead of looping the same playlist? Randomly playing songs has a very low royalty compared to on-demand.
The lesson here -- obnoxious ads work to drive your customers away. But they may be more likely to go to a competitor than your own pay service.
I would prefer to see a short 20 years period which would quickly separate out public domain stuff that people don't care about. That's the whole orphan work problem -- after a work is 50 years old it becomes almost impossible to track down the copyright holders and ask for permission.
Then maybe move to 10 year renewals at something along the lines of $1000, $5000, $10000, $15000, etc. Note that Disney probably has 100,000 works they want to keep protected. They are going to have to pay a renewal fee on each of those. Everything from movies to coloring books to costumes to dolls. We're not trying to make it impossible for Disney, just make it harder. Clearly Disney will keep paying these fees for movies with multi-million dollar investments, but they will probably stop paying them on lesser items like a coloring book.
You also need to consider the music industry. I want to set things up so that most 30 year old music will become public domain. Sure the big rights holders will renew the fees on the big hits, but millions of lesser tracks will fall into the public domain - unlike the current situation where 99% of all recorded music is locked up. The goal here is to push 40 year old works that generate $5,000 or less in annual revenue out into the public domain instead of leaving them locked up and maybe selling a few copies a year - if any.
Also note that the payment database creates an authoritative record of what is protected and what isn't.
This 150 years automatically for free is ridiculous. Copyright works turn into culture after a while. We can't have our entire culture being owned. Consider that photos and recordings of WWII will be under copyright until after most of us are dead.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
Wow, someone who stayed awake during economics class!
The root of SF's problems is decades of government interference in the housing market. Adam Smith's invisible hand would sort everything out if the government would stop holding it back. Market forces work at all levels, if there are not enough restaurants to satisfy demand prices will rise and workers will get paid more. Everything falls apart when people in the government think they are smarter than the invisible hand and enact laws supporting their social agendas. There is an obvious correlation in America with city governments that interfere with the housing market and problems in those same cities with housing the poor. In general the more the government interferes to worse it gets for the majority of the poor, select segments of the poor benefit from government interference, but those not selected get hurt a lot more.
Great, then the owners of those restaurants will have to pay their workers more!
No area is going to lose all of their restaurants, etc. There is always demand for services like that. Prices will adjust and employee pay will increase. Restaurant workers in NYC already get paid triple what a restaurant worker in Alabama gets.
Why is this a bad thing? It is called capitalism. Should we build a moat around NYC and keep out all of the people willing to pay more for housing in order to protect cheap rents for people already inside the moat?
I really do get annoyed at people that try and use the government and legal system to force property owners into giving them below market rents. Haven't we learned that is a good way to turn decent neighborhoods into slums? In some cases rent control laws have reach such idiotic proportions that the landlord is actually paying the tenant to live in the unit since the rent doesn't cover the property taxes.
Let supply and demand function without interference in order to establish a market level price.
The compensation paid by Uber/Lyft for doing a ride should include enough profit to cover some down-time and deadheading to the next pick up. So if you stay busy you will get enough padding to cover reasonable gap between your rides. But if you just turn the app on and don't pay attention to it, you won't be getting anything to cover down-time.
That is how existing taxis work. The drivers pays a flat fee for the 24hr rental. If he does one fare in 24hrs he won't make anything, if he does 30 fares he makes a lot. If the cabby has too much downtime he does get enough excess profit to pay him for his down time.that
If Uber paid to simply have the app on, they would end up with way too many drivers active relative to demand. What's to stop a thousand drivers from leaving the app on while they sleep for eight hours. There will be a few drivers awake that service that demand, the rest will be able to earn minimum wage while they sleep. They might even sort themselves into groups to support this scam.
Taxi drivers pay the taxi cab company to rent the taxi in 24hr blocks. What they do with it during the 24 hrs is their own business. Taxi drivers are independent contractors not employees. If a taxi driver is idling for a fare, that's because he chose to not because his employer made him do it.
Retail clerks have assigned tasks to do when no customers are present. How do you think the stores get restocked and who refolds everything when someone messes it all up? Who does inventory, who cleans the restroom, etc....
For sure we can legally classify gig workers as employees, downside to doing that is that there will be a whole lot fewer gig jobs available. So that may end up being good for 10% of the current workers and really bad for the other 90%. My two cents is that a third legal classification is needed. Gig workers don't cleanly fit into either of the two existing classifications.
A common issue with these wage calculations is - what happens when you are logged into the app but there are no fares? If you count that time as working, then your hourly rate will be quite low. But are you really working if the app is on and you are just waiting for a fare to show up?
This is part of the argument the employee rights people try to make, they want people to be paid minimum wage just for turning the app on. But that immediately falls apart because drivers often log into Uber and Lyft simultaneously. Should they get double minimum wage for logging in twice? And what about bad actors taking advantage of this? Doing the minimum of number of runs need to stay on as a driver and then collecting most of their income simply from having the app on all of the time.
So two people can look at the same data and come up with widely different views of what the hourly wage is.
Via car Google maps quotes 21 minutes form my house to Harvard Square. Via mass transit the estimate is an hour and 45 minutes. Plus I have to wait 45 minutes before I can start the trip. This is because it is impossible to do the trip on mass transit without a transfer.
In Boston try one-way on commuter rail $7.50 plus $2.25 for the subway. Round trip is $20-25 depending on destination. Uber Pool is cheaper than mass transit if you need to travel to the suburbs. Plus it is door to door. Of course mass transit is cheaper with a monthly pass, but it is still not cheap.
Mass transit is of limited use. It is a pain when you have to do a transfer or your destination is a long ways from a stop. I can easily see Uber which offers door to door service pulling people off from a mass transit system that doesn't really go where they need it to.
Boston also has a special problem of the north commuter rail system not being connected to the south one. So if you have to cross this boundary it forces a transfer onto the subway. Subway and commuter rail are separate systems and require two fares. When you add this up, an Uber Pool is definitely price competitive.
I think a lot of rural people would choose to have an unsafe bridge their kids cross on the way to school fixed before getting subsidized broadband. And there are an awful lot of those unsafe bridges in rural America.
Here lies there conceptual problem: "My concerns are at a different level and have to do with the way industry at large will be able to access innovation. AOM will certainly give much needed stability to the video codec market but this will come at the cost of reduced if not entirely halted technical progress. There will simply be no incentive for a company to develop new video compression technologies knowing that it assets will be thankfully – and nothing more – accepted by AOM for use in its video codec."
He simply doesn't get network effects. It is not 'thanks' that you get by putting the technology into a free pool, when everyone does this it creates a broad and compatible market for everyone to sell into. The only group that does not benefit from this are the NPEs since they don't sell anything.
Look at all of the technology going into Linux and tell me the only thing people are getting out of Linux is 'thanks'. Royalties are not the only way to make money (unless you are a NPE).
Abobe and Autodesk still make software? I thought those companies were dead.
You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.
This Russian ad spend was on the order of a few hundred thousands dollars. A couple hundred thousand does nothing when applied to large numbers of people. Put into perspective that the candidates spent two billion dollars.
You can then try to make the argument that the Russians highly focused the ads on to a specific target group. But that rapidly turns into preaching to the choir. It is easy to get a highly targeted group to do what the ads imply, that is simply because they were very likely to do whatever it was anyway. But there is no way that 700,000 people is a tightly selected group like that.
How big are the clouds at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc? I suspect if you could afford it, AWS would be #1.