The commerce clause isn't "anything you want it to be", it's just a massively powerful constitutional clause. Perhaps one which the founders didn't anticipate being massively powerful, but one that was written that way none the less
When the founders wrote the constitution, the US was, for all intents and purposes a federation of states, largely speaking the states were independent and the federal government was essentially the arbiter of disagreements between them. That was fine and dandy back then because that's how things actually were, there were very few multinational or even interstate corporations in existence and to most people the neighboring state may as well have been make believe because they'd never see it.
The world has changed, interstate companies and even international companies are now the norm. Pretty much every commercial transaction you take part in is interstate, and so the commerce clause applies to pretty much everything you do.
It's sort of one of those problems facing most federations(including the EU for all that it was formed in the last few decades). The model works great when states are largely independent, but it falls down very quickly when they're not as you end up in this situation whereby either the arbitration powers of the federal government become all encompassing or the federal government can't do its job due to extensive restrictions. In reality it's probably time for a lot of countries to take a fresh look at their constitutions and make a judgement as to what should actually be the domain of the states and how exactly that's all going to work now that states aren't, for all intents and purposes, independent countries. How do you regulate Goldman Sachs? Which state or local government controls them? Do we regulate them where their corporate office is(City of New York)? Where the client lives? Where the transaction took place? Which level of government is closes to Goldman Sachs? To the Mississippi River? To Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or your bank? Perhaps unfortunately there is very little that can still be effectively regulated by the states, let alone local government.
That's not to say the court isn't corrupt and partial(though I'd suggest that has more to do with the process of picking judges than anything else, Supreme Court appointments are not based on merit, but on politics, so unsurprisingly Supreme Court Justices are political creatures), but the explosion of the commerce clause isn't really a result of that.
I agree with you there(though I probably have a different solution), but the point of it is that this case is a bit of a long shot even if you had a very different supreme court than we currently do.
That said, as I've stated, it's a long shot with pretty much no down side for the people involved. Arguing in front of the SC is a career win for the lawyers and even if they came back with some massively pro copyright ruling it wouldn't increase the fine. We could potentially end up with such a ruling which would hurt everyone else, but it wouldn't make this individual's situation any worse.
No he said DNF was released, which was one of the first signs of the end of the world. The final sign was the release of Enlightenment DR17, which has been in development since 2000 and will probably still be in development until long after I am dead. It's one of those projects where the developers are striving for an impossible degree of perfection and so never actually finish. It's not been quite as long as GNU Hurd, but E16 was a damned fantastic window manager(a bit out of date now) whereas GNU Hurd is a kernel no one cares about except RMS.
That's not entirely a fair statement. Most companies are founded by people with knowledge or skills specific to the companies core product so generally speaking the first outside person they hire is going to be someone who has skills they don't have, a lot of times that's going to be someone in admin as opposed to a lawyer, but I'd be seriously surprised to find many software companies whose first employee was a developer.
The problem with Facebook's advertising model is that it relies on what is, essentially, a rather risky business prospect.
Targeted advertising is immensely successful within a very narrow band between the point where the ad becomes relevant to your interests(or more ideally needs) and the point where it feels like a massive privacy intrusion. This is a delicate balance to manage.
If you don't predict an individuals needs well enough the ad isn't effective. GM pulled out in essence because Facebook couldn't work out who could afford a new car and was in the market for a new car better than Google could. This makes sense since Google finds people searching for information on cars and Facebook is stuck working with people who like expensive things and/or cars.
The alternative side is even worse for a company. If you cross a line into what a customer thinks is creepy, then not only do you potentially damage the brand you're advertising, but also the facebook brand and everyone associated with it.
Facebook can almost certainly target ads better than Google can, but there's some serious questions as to how much of that capacity falls in the effective band. No one really minds being shown an ad for a car when they search for "car sales", but they might object to being presented with ads which indicate the advertiser knows a lot of very private things about them. There's also plenty of historical evidence for these kinds of services that they can fall even more quickly than they rose. How far can Facebook monetize its services before people stop using it? To reach market expectations Facebook needs to essentially increase its revenues by a factor of 20 or so and its profits by probably around the same amount within the next year (analysts are looking for a doubling of value within a year and it needs about a factor of 10 increase to be worth what it sold for today). Facebook can't increase its subscriber base by that much(there aren't enough people in the world), so they've got to extract more revenue from what they have. I don't see them being able to do that with the required intensity without destroying the service.
Steam offers you some carrot with the stick, it's up to you to decide if that's worth it. On the one hand you have to run Steam, which if you've got a PC from 2001 might possibly be considered resource hungry to play your games. On the other hand you can install and play that game on as many systems as you like(one system at a time). If you lose your disks you can download the game again for no cost aside from bandwidth, etc.
Steam is selling you a license for your game with all the requisite downsides to that equation(no resale value, restrictions on use), but they're also giving you the benefits of that equation as well(play anywhere you have a net connection any time you like). Most "In Game DRM" on the other hand, is just about as resource hungry as Steam and provides you with all the downsides the license model and all the downsides of the box sale model in one fell swoop.
Not advocating DRM here, simply saying that Steam is up front about what kind of system it is, gives you some benefits in exchange for you what you give up and is generally reasonable compromise when compared to systems where you have to be on the internet at all times to play but simultaneously have things like limited activations and no replacement of media.
The Supreme court can't, as such, change it, they can say "These fines are cruel and unusual punishment and therefor in violation of the constitution" though. This of course doesn't replace the fines, but it does remove the existing ones. Congress would then have to actually get together and set a new amount, likely following guidance from the SC decision.
Now the likelihood of this happening is not exactly high. The current SC has voted very heavily in favor of both corporations and conservative ideals. About the only shot he's got is if the conservatives decide that the content industry are a bunch of pinko communists and rule against them out of spite, a ruling based on a clear interpretation of the law seems unlikely at this point.
The big upshot of this for the defendant is that with that part of the law being struck down and no other law currently in existence to charge him under he'd probably walk away with no penalty at all or at worst some sort of proved "actual damages".
I think at this point Tenenbaum is probably looking at it from the point of view that the Supreme Court can't make his damages any worse than they already are(there could be some down sides for defendants in this kind of a case as a whole, but not for Joel), his lawyers are looking at a shot to argue in front of the Supreme Court and they're sort of saying "Why not?". Now the SC won't take the case, even if they did they're in bed with corporations and conservative politics, and even if they weren't, despite what Slashdot seems to think, Intellectual Property doesn't violate the constitution and the penalties are probably not quite so draconian as to cause the SC to interfere with an act of Congress. A bit excessive certainly, but cruel and unusual punishment is a fairly high standard to overcome, I mean the SC has ruled that it's just fine to execute the mentally disabled so what shot does a guy who's only dealing with money have?
I think all of that is important because when I write Java code I want it to work wherever I want to put it, and prior to Google, it came pretty close to doing so. Java is a pig of a language, but it was the most flexible, transferable and therefor free languages in existence. You could write code in Java and be fairly certain that pretty much everyone would be able to run it out of the box and the very few who couldn't would be able to get a JRE which would then run it, this was true even for the most part on mobile devices, if you had a phone which was powerful enough to do anything, it most likely supported Java. Now with Apple's attack on it, and Google forking it, that is no longer true. At this point, if you want to code for multiple devices, you're far better off using.NET/Mono because it works more places(there's even apps to compile mono to objective C) and it's a better language. Java is dying, and for all that Slashdot seems to think that that's fine, for the future of open source, for the future of alternatives to Microsoft, it really isn't. I'm a.NET programmer and I like a lot of Microsoft products, but alternatives to those products need to exist and they need to be viable, because a Microsoft monopoly isn't good for anyone.
Except that's not entirely the case, not everything in Davlik is in Java and vice versa, it's close, but it's not identical. That's not even taking into account the fact that the compiled bytecode isn't even remotely similar.
Well I actually meant wrong as in a synonym for incorrect, but creating a non standard fork of a language without changing it enough to create a new language is also wrong in the "it's the wrong thing to do" sense. We do not need "dialects" of Java, or any other language, versions are messy enough. This is one of the hardest pieces of this case. Google need to be smacked so hard their employees grand kids are dizzy for this crap, but copyrighting APIs, while not the end of the world as a lot of people seem to think is not a great thing. So I want Oracle to win, but not the way they are trying to do so. Unfortunately being an arrogant jack ass is not illegal so Oracle is stuck with this course.
It was a typical Google thing. Google aren't evil, they're just immensely stupid clever people. If you'd told any normal person off the street what the company was doing that normal person could have told them it was going to land them in hot water. Google apparently don't have any normal people on staff they can ask, so they at least claim to not have known what they were doing was wrong.
This case is another classic example of exactly the same thing. Building a major product around software which is questionably licensed instead of tossing a couple of bucks per unit sold to Oracle was immensely stupid. Even if they win they'll have spent more money on lawyers than it would have cost to license Java, and in the end Davlik isn't even any faster or better than Java anymore.
Given the result that came back from the Jury, no he's not going to squirm his way out of it. However the alternative to giving the instructions that he did was that the Jury is held until the Judge makes his decision which could take weeks. As is they get to go home having made their decision, if the judge decides the APIs are copyrightable, then their judgement stands, if he doesn't then it doesn't. Either way the jurors are done.
Citation. The actions Google took by recording data off open wireless connections was illegal in most European countries. They paid strict fines for this.
No, not directing them would have wasted the Juries time because they would have had to wait until he did.
Really this isn't a surprising verdict, if APIs are copyrightable, then Google most certainly violated said copyright. The facts of the case are fairly cut and dried. Now we get to the legal part which will be more interesting.
I have real difficulty with this case because what Google did was wrong and stupid, but the potential consequences of making APIs copyrighted, even within a limited scope is a little bit scary. Not quite the end of the world as has been portrayed on Slashdot (most intended uses like actually developing it would either be explicitly protected by law or given blanket licenses by the copyright holders fairly quickly. There would be some risk to WINE, though I'm not sure WINE would be considered sufficiently threatening for Microsoft to risk the bad press, Mono is explicitly approved and supported by Microsoft, and SAMBA benefits Microsoft, other emulators might be more or less at risk.
I'd always heard neo con used in the context of the shift from old fashioned conservatism to the sort of "free market" "trickle down" stuff primarily beginning under Reagan and continuing largely to the present day. The usual bunch of crap "lower taxes on the rich, remove the social safety net, corporatist crap", it appears that's not the technical definition of the term, but it is how it is generally used. If there is a better term, substitute that term for neo con in the previous statement and the point still stands.
Legal and right are not synonymous. Concentration camps were legal, a gay man marrying his partner is not. I'd argue the first was wrong the second is right.
Yes, exactly, we should all run our countries like Ireland. They have no corporate taxes so they must be a bastion of innovation with a booming economy and full employment.
Oh wait, they have a bunch of shell offices for major corporations which pay no corporate tax and hire one person, they're broke, and they're economy is fucked, let's not.
It's funny how the neo cons all forgot the Irish. A few years ago they were the country to be idolized if you were a conservative, low corporate taxes, close to zero regulation, everything they believe creates a wonderful economy. Then it all fell in a pile because their unregulated banks, with the help of unregulated US banks, fucked them, and the corporations they didn't tax paid no tax but didn't open up offices to generate other benefits. Now if you talk to a neo con Ireland is just like the other PIGS and must have been a dirty socialist pit with profligate spending habits.
It's not binding precedence but a jury verdict provides nothing at all.
As for the appeal, IANAL but to the best of my knowledge, if the jury comes back that even if the APIs are copyrightable Google didn't infringe them, Google walks away. I'm not sure of any grounds for appealing the verdict of a finding by a jury when a verdict of not guilty is entered, and it generally takes gross malfeasance on behalf of some member of the court even in a guilty verdict. Oracle can't complain about those instructions to the Jury, and if the decision goes the other way we end up with an issue of law which will be appealed either way. This is an eminently sensible thing for the judge to have done.
That said, the US system of giving jurors $5/day is hideously stupid, and the process for disqualifying jurors and allowing jurors to avoid jury duty leads to bad trial outcomes. When I got called up last year I had no opportunity to get out of it(though I could delay it for up to 6 months), and I got paid my full salary by my employer who was reimbursed by the state. Sure the unemployed got kind of screwed, but it's a better system.
I'd like Jury Nullification to be a great and noble thing too, but generally speaking it isn't. For every instance where it turned over an oppressive law there's a murderer who goes free because the jury doesn't see the rights of his victims. It's rather a moot point of course since the only way to prevent jury nullification would be to either allow appeals on not guilty verdicts or to interrogate the jurors about their reasoning, neither of which is feasible.
My point is that there are a lot of down sides to the jury taking the law into their own hands, potentially far more than their are up sides. Jury nullification is not a thing to be taken lightly, nor do your feelings regarding a law mean that the majority feel that way, however much you may want them to.
It's not misleading bullshit, it's happened. Juries in the south routinely nullified murder cases with white defendants and black victims. Just because your world involves only people doing what you agree with doesn't mean it's really that way. In fact the vast majority of cases of jury nullification have followed this exact pattern.
OTOH, if the judge makes the decision that the APIs are copyrightable that decision creates precedence(as does the reverse of course). That decision whichever way it would go has lasting consequences for everyone, particularly if the judge is likely to rule that they are copyrightable. Either way the judge's ruling is going to be dragged through appeals courts up to the supreme court who will not know what to do when two gigantic mega corporations are suing each other since they won't know which decision follows the republican party line.
If on the other hand, the jury decides that, even if they were copyrightable Google isn't guilty, then the whole problem goes away and the judge doesn't have to decide and no one has to appeal the decision. Your time for two weeks might save everyone a whole lot of pain.
This is the difficult part about this case. Google should lose because forking Java is bad for the entire Java ecosystem and Google were a bunch of dickheads to do it in the first place, especially since they didn't do it particularly well.
On the other hand, while it is likely that with the possible exception of WINE, all of the previously mentioned cases are FUD because the copyright holder has shown zero interest in enforcing that right(in the case of Mono, Microsoft actually contributes code to that project), there are still some potentially hairy issues if this goes through that way.
The reality is that the creation of implementations of standards which do not conform to said standards(Davlik) need to be prevented and crushed), but the legal framework to do so is somewhat limited.
Slashdot Mirror
The commerce clause isn't "anything you want it to be", it's just a massively powerful constitutional clause. Perhaps one which the founders didn't anticipate being massively powerful, but one that was written that way none the less
When the founders wrote the constitution, the US was, for all intents and purposes a federation of states, largely speaking the states were independent and the federal government was essentially the arbiter of disagreements between them. That was fine and dandy back then because that's how things actually were, there were very few multinational or even interstate corporations in existence and to most people the neighboring state may as well have been make believe because they'd never see it.
The world has changed, interstate companies and even international companies are now the norm. Pretty much every commercial transaction you take part in is interstate, and so the commerce clause applies to pretty much everything you do.
It's sort of one of those problems facing most federations(including the EU for all that it was formed in the last few decades). The model works great when states are largely independent, but it falls down very quickly when they're not as you end up in this situation whereby either the arbitration powers of the federal government become all encompassing or the federal government can't do its job due to extensive restrictions. In reality it's probably time for a lot of countries to take a fresh look at their constitutions and make a judgement as to what should actually be the domain of the states and how exactly that's all going to work now that states aren't, for all intents and purposes, independent countries. How do you regulate Goldman Sachs? Which state or local government controls them? Do we regulate them where their corporate office is(City of New York)? Where the client lives? Where the transaction took place? Which level of government is closes to Goldman Sachs? To the Mississippi River? To Microsoft, or Google, or Apple, or your bank? Perhaps unfortunately there is very little that can still be effectively regulated by the states, let alone local government.
That's not to say the court isn't corrupt and partial(though I'd suggest that has more to do with the process of picking judges than anything else, Supreme Court appointments are not based on merit, but on politics, so unsurprisingly Supreme Court Justices are political creatures), but the explosion of the commerce clause isn't really a result of that.
I agree with you there(though I probably have a different solution), but the point of it is that this case is a bit of a long shot even if you had a very different supreme court than we currently do.
That said, as I've stated, it's a long shot with pretty much no down side for the people involved. Arguing in front of the SC is a career win for the lawyers and even if they came back with some massively pro copyright ruling it wouldn't increase the fine. We could potentially end up with such a ruling which would hurt everyone else, but it wouldn't make this individual's situation any worse.
No he said DNF was released, which was one of the first signs of the end of the world. The final sign was the release of Enlightenment DR17, which has been in development since 2000 and will probably still be in development until long after I am dead. It's one of those projects where the developers are striving for an impossible degree of perfection and so never actually finish. It's not been quite as long as GNU Hurd, but E16 was a damned fantastic window manager(a bit out of date now) whereas GNU Hurd is a kernel no one cares about except RMS.
That's not entirely a fair statement. Most companies are founded by people with knowledge or skills specific to the companies core product so generally speaking the first outside person they hire is going to be someone who has skills they don't have, a lot of times that's going to be someone in admin as opposed to a lawyer, but I'd be seriously surprised to find many software companies whose first employee was a developer.
The problem with Facebook's advertising model is that it relies on what is, essentially, a rather risky business prospect.
Targeted advertising is immensely successful within a very narrow band between the point where the ad becomes relevant to your interests(or more ideally needs) and the point where it feels like a massive privacy intrusion. This is a delicate balance to manage.
If you don't predict an individuals needs well enough the ad isn't effective. GM pulled out in essence because Facebook couldn't work out who could afford a new car and was in the market for a new car better than Google could. This makes sense since Google finds people searching for information on cars and Facebook is stuck working with people who like expensive things and/or cars.
The alternative side is even worse for a company. If you cross a line into what a customer thinks is creepy, then not only do you potentially damage the brand you're advertising, but also the facebook brand and everyone associated with it.
Facebook can almost certainly target ads better than Google can, but there's some serious questions as to how much of that capacity falls in the effective band. No one really minds being shown an ad for a car when they search for "car sales", but they might object to being presented with ads which indicate the advertiser knows a lot of very private things about them. There's also plenty of historical evidence for these kinds of services that they can fall even more quickly than they rose. How far can Facebook monetize its services before people stop using it? To reach market expectations Facebook needs to essentially increase its revenues by a factor of 20 or so and its profits by probably around the same amount within the next year (analysts are looking for a doubling of value within a year and it needs about a factor of 10 increase to be worth what it sold for today). Facebook can't increase its subscriber base by that much(there aren't enough people in the world), so they've got to extract more revenue from what they have. I don't see them being able to do that with the required intensity without destroying the service.
Steam offers you some carrot with the stick, it's up to you to decide if that's worth it. On the one hand you have to run Steam, which if you've got a PC from 2001 might possibly be considered resource hungry to play your games. On the other hand you can install and play that game on as many systems as you like(one system at a time). If you lose your disks you can download the game again for no cost aside from bandwidth, etc.
Steam is selling you a license for your game with all the requisite downsides to that equation(no resale value, restrictions on use), but they're also giving you the benefits of that equation as well(play anywhere you have a net connection any time you like). Most "In Game DRM" on the other hand, is just about as resource hungry as Steam and provides you with all the downsides the license model and all the downsides of the box sale model in one fell swoop.
Not advocating DRM here, simply saying that Steam is up front about what kind of system it is, gives you some benefits in exchange for you what you give up and is generally reasonable compromise when compared to systems where you have to be on the internet at all times to play but simultaneously have things like limited activations and no replacement of media.
The Supreme court can't, as such, change it, they can say "These fines are cruel and unusual punishment and therefor in violation of the constitution" though. This of course doesn't replace the fines, but it does remove the existing ones. Congress would then have to actually get together and set a new amount, likely following guidance from the SC decision.
Now the likelihood of this happening is not exactly high. The current SC has voted very heavily in favor of both corporations and conservative ideals. About the only shot he's got is if the conservatives decide that the content industry are a bunch of pinko communists and rule against them out of spite, a ruling based on a clear interpretation of the law seems unlikely at this point.
The big upshot of this for the defendant is that with that part of the law being struck down and no other law currently in existence to charge him under he'd probably walk away with no penalty at all or at worst some sort of proved "actual damages".
I think at this point Tenenbaum is probably looking at it from the point of view that the Supreme Court can't make his damages any worse than they already are(there could be some down sides for defendants in this kind of a case as a whole, but not for Joel), his lawyers are looking at a shot to argue in front of the Supreme Court and they're sort of saying "Why not?". Now the SC won't take the case, even if they did they're in bed with corporations and conservative politics, and even if they weren't, despite what Slashdot seems to think, Intellectual Property doesn't violate the constitution and the penalties are probably not quite so draconian as to cause the SC to interfere with an act of Congress. A bit excessive certainly, but cruel and unusual punishment is a fairly high standard to overcome, I mean the SC has ruled that it's just fine to execute the mentally disabled so what shot does a guy who's only dealing with money have?
And the reporter who presented that story got fired.
I think all of that is important because when I write Java code I want it to work wherever I want to put it, and prior to Google, it came pretty close to doing so. Java is a pig of a language, but it was the most flexible, transferable and therefor free languages in existence. You could write code in Java and be fairly certain that pretty much everyone would be able to run it out of the box and the very few who couldn't would be able to get a JRE which would then run it, this was true even for the most part on mobile devices, if you had a phone which was powerful enough to do anything, it most likely supported Java. Now with Apple's attack on it, and Google forking it, that is no longer true. At this point, if you want to code for multiple devices, you're far better off using .NET/Mono because it works more places(there's even apps to compile mono to objective C) and it's a better language. Java is dying, and for all that Slashdot seems to think that that's fine, for the future of open source, for the future of alternatives to Microsoft, it really isn't. I'm a .NET programmer and I like a lot of Microsoft products, but alternatives to those products need to exist and they need to be viable, because a Microsoft monopoly isn't good for anyone.
Except that's not entirely the case, not everything in Davlik is in Java and vice versa, it's close, but it's not identical. That's not even taking into account the fact that the compiled bytecode isn't even remotely similar.
Well I actually meant wrong as in a synonym for incorrect, but creating a non standard fork of a language without changing it enough to create a new language is also wrong in the "it's the wrong thing to do" sense. We do not need "dialects" of Java, or any other language, versions are messy enough. This is one of the hardest pieces of this case. Google need to be smacked so hard their employees grand kids are dizzy for this crap, but copyrighting APIs, while not the end of the world as a lot of people seem to think is not a great thing. So I want Oracle to win, but not the way they are trying to do so. Unfortunately being an arrogant jack ass is not illegal so Oracle is stuck with this course.
It was a typical Google thing. Google aren't evil, they're just immensely stupid clever people. If you'd told any normal person off the street what the company was doing that normal person could have told them it was going to land them in hot water. Google apparently don't have any normal people on staff they can ask, so they at least claim to not have known what they were doing was wrong.
This case is another classic example of exactly the same thing. Building a major product around software which is questionably licensed instead of tossing a couple of bucks per unit sold to Oracle was immensely stupid. Even if they win they'll have spent more money on lawyers than it would have cost to license Java, and in the end Davlik isn't even any faster or better than Java anymore.
Given the result that came back from the Jury, no he's not going to squirm his way out of it. However the alternative to giving the instructions that he did was that the Jury is held until the Judge makes his decision which could take weeks. As is they get to go home having made their decision, if the judge decides the APIs are copyrightable, then their judgement stands, if he doesn't then it doesn't. Either way the jurors are done.
Citation. The actions Google took by recording data off open wireless connections was illegal in most European countries. They paid strict fines for this.
No, not directing them would have wasted the Juries time because they would have had to wait until he did.
Really this isn't a surprising verdict, if APIs are copyrightable, then Google most certainly violated said copyright. The facts of the case are fairly cut and dried. Now we get to the legal part which will be more interesting.
I have real difficulty with this case because what Google did was wrong and stupid, but the potential consequences of making APIs copyrighted, even within a limited scope is a little bit scary. Not quite the end of the world as has been portrayed on Slashdot (most intended uses like actually developing it would either be explicitly protected by law or given blanket licenses by the copyright holders fairly quickly. There would be some risk to WINE, though I'm not sure WINE would be considered sufficiently threatening for Microsoft to risk the bad press, Mono is explicitly approved and supported by Microsoft, and SAMBA benefits Microsoft, other emulators might be more or less at risk.
I'd always heard neo con used in the context of the shift from old fashioned conservatism to the sort of "free market" "trickle down" stuff primarily beginning under Reagan and continuing largely to the present day. The usual bunch of crap "lower taxes on the rich, remove the social safety net, corporatist crap", it appears that's not the technical definition of the term, but it is how it is generally used. If there is a better term, substitute that term for neo con in the previous statement and the point still stands.
Legal and right are not synonymous. Concentration camps were legal, a gay man marrying his partner is not. I'd argue the first was wrong the second is right.
Yes, exactly, we should all run our countries like Ireland. They have no corporate taxes so they must be a bastion of innovation with a booming economy and full employment.
Oh wait, they have a bunch of shell offices for major corporations which pay no corporate tax and hire one person, they're broke, and they're economy is fucked, let's not.
It's funny how the neo cons all forgot the Irish. A few years ago they were the country to be idolized if you were a conservative, low corporate taxes, close to zero regulation, everything they believe creates a wonderful economy. Then it all fell in a pile because their unregulated banks, with the help of unregulated US banks, fucked them, and the corporations they didn't tax paid no tax but didn't open up offices to generate other benefits. Now if you talk to a neo con Ireland is just like the other PIGS and must have been a dirty socialist pit with profligate spending habits.
It's not binding precedence but a jury verdict provides nothing at all.
As for the appeal, IANAL but to the best of my knowledge, if the jury comes back that even if the APIs are copyrightable Google didn't infringe them, Google walks away. I'm not sure of any grounds for appealing the verdict of a finding by a jury when a verdict of not guilty is entered, and it generally takes gross malfeasance on behalf of some member of the court even in a guilty verdict. Oracle can't complain about those instructions to the Jury, and if the decision goes the other way we end up with an issue of law which will be appealed either way. This is an eminently sensible thing for the judge to have done.
That said, the US system of giving jurors $5/day is hideously stupid, and the process for disqualifying jurors and allowing jurors to avoid jury duty leads to bad trial outcomes. When I got called up last year I had no opportunity to get out of it(though I could delay it for up to 6 months), and I got paid my full salary by my employer who was reimbursed by the state. Sure the unemployed got kind of screwed, but it's a better system.
I'd like Jury Nullification to be a great and noble thing too, but generally speaking it isn't. For every instance where it turned over an oppressive law there's a murderer who goes free because the jury doesn't see the rights of his victims. It's rather a moot point of course since the only way to prevent jury nullification would be to either allow appeals on not guilty verdicts or to interrogate the jurors about their reasoning, neither of which is feasible.
My point is that there are a lot of down sides to the jury taking the law into their own hands, potentially far more than their are up sides. Jury nullification is not a thing to be taken lightly, nor do your feelings regarding a law mean that the majority feel that way, however much you may want them to.
Like the statute making it illegal for southern Caucasians to murder African Americans which was nullified a number of times.
It's not misleading bullshit, it's happened. Juries in the south routinely nullified murder cases with white defendants and black victims. Just because your world involves only people doing what you agree with doesn't mean it's really that way. In fact the vast majority of cases of jury nullification have followed this exact pattern.
Very simple. x86 instructions ran on both AMD and Intel, the same is not true of Davlik and Java.
OTOH, if the judge makes the decision that the APIs are copyrightable that decision creates precedence(as does the reverse of course). That decision whichever way it would go has lasting consequences for everyone, particularly if the judge is likely to rule that they are copyrightable. Either way the judge's ruling is going to be dragged through appeals courts up to the supreme court who will not know what to do when two gigantic mega corporations are suing each other since they won't know which decision follows the republican party line.
If on the other hand, the jury decides that, even if they were copyrightable Google isn't guilty, then the whole problem goes away and the judge doesn't have to decide and no one has to appeal the decision. Your time for two weeks might save everyone a whole lot of pain.
This is the difficult part about this case. Google should lose because forking Java is bad for the entire Java ecosystem and Google were a bunch of dickheads to do it in the first place, especially since they didn't do it particularly well.
On the other hand, while it is likely that with the possible exception of WINE, all of the previously mentioned cases are FUD because the copyright holder has shown zero interest in enforcing that right(in the case of Mono, Microsoft actually contributes code to that project), there are still some potentially hairy issues if this goes through that way.
The reality is that the creation of implementations of standards which do not conform to said standards(Davlik) need to be prevented and crushed), but the legal framework to do so is somewhat limited.