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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 01:48 PM EDT |
Fixed in a tangible medium is not the only requirement for copyright protection.
Read the often cited Baker vs Selden. The court was quite clear that even if you
copied Selden's forms exactly, you would not be infringing copyright. More
recent and applicable to computers is Lotus vs Borland. Again, the menu
structure was certainly fixed in a tangible medium (source code and binary) and
was copied exactly. But the court found no infringement.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 02:39 PM EDT |
Which receive no protection.
The good Judge A said so. And the parties agreed to the stipulation. Beyond the
names, what's left in an API specification is little more than fluff, font
selection, table layout etc. etc.
The names are not protected, everyone already agreed to that.
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| Authored by: scav on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 04:23 PM EDT |
When you take an API specification that was
recorded on some fixed
medium (printed or electronic), and
you type it into your source code editor in
order to
implement the API, you have made a copy of the
API.
Nope. You don't do anything of the kind. The API
specification document is NOT copied into the source code of
an implementation
of the API. There are functional
elements in the implementation that
correspond to facts
described in the specification, but:
- They are
unprotectable elements because functional and
required for
interoperability.
- They are not the API itself, nor a copy of it
(whatever
that means). They are part of an implementation of it and
separate
work.
- As a matter of industry practice and common sense, they
are not a
derivative work, and Oracle's position that they
are is flat out untenable. It
goes beyond estoppel - it's
like some kind of super-meta-estoppel, where
everybody
ever, including Oracle has been acting all along as
though
the whole point of published specifications
is to allow independent
implementations, and suddenly Oracle
wants to change the rules purely because
they need it to be
otherwise temporarily to rescue their hopeless
badly-
conceived litigation.
Entertain the possibility that you
are mistaken about this.
---
The emperor, undaunted by overwhelming
evidence that he had no clothes, redoubled his siege of Antarctica to extort
tribute from the penguins. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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