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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 10:48 PM EDT |
s/borrowed from Java/borrowed from Perl/
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 11:11 PM EDT |
Not only that, the Java Sockets APIs look very similar to
standard socket APIs, how can Sun copyright something that is
"stolen" from other works?
And there are probably more instances where APIs map to other
standard APIs.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Regex - Authored by: mschmitz on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 11:49 PM EDT
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| Authored by: tknarr on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 01:55 AM EDT |
s/Java/ed/g (although ed got them from an earlier editor, which got
them from earlier mathematical work). Regexes then got used in grep, awk, sed
and other Unix tools, gained a lot of extensions in Perl and other languages.
Java got them I believe from Perl, though with so many potential sources I doubt
even the creators of Java could say for certain where they got them from. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: hardmath on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 09:37 AM EDT |
The letter and spirit of copyright law is protection for the
manner of expression (in materials that have been reduced to
a fixed form) and not for the ideas contained therein.
When only one or very few forms of expression are suitable
for an idea, the form of expression is not copyright
protectable, even to the original author, in order to
preserve everyone's right of expression for the underlying
idea. The merger doctrine extends this slight, to cases
where the manner of expression and the underlying functional
requirement are not easily separated, coming down on the
side of losing copyright protection to preserve freedom of
ideas.
It is well established that source code can be protected by
copyright to the extent it expresses ideas in an original
way. When ideas are borrowed, and the original copyrighted
source was available to the borrower, then the question
becomes whether there is substantial similarity of the
resulting source code with the original.
The issue with the API is that it is not source code and
does not have much if any copyright protectable content.
The naming of classes and methods are not copyright
protectable (settled law as far as this Judge and case are
concerned). The structure of the API is entirely determined
by those names. The selection of APIs is more open to
claims of expression, but the facts would not favor Oracle
in that APIs are selected and developed by the JCP (Java
Community Process) which has been in place since 1998, and
which brings external contributions to bear on the selection
and specification of the new APIs. Finally the organization
of the APIs is merely that closely related classes are
"packaged" into packages and subpackages whose names reflect
that organization, and the file names are not protectable.
Oracle has been suspiciously quiet in examining their
witnesses as to the basis for original expression in the SSO
of the 37 accused APIs, and it has been testified that at
least some part of those (e.g. java.lang) are essential to
using the the Java programming language per se.
I think this is why we keep seeing the Judge ask for clear
positions on the copyrightable elements of the APIs to be
briefed. He must surely feel that Oracle has not staked out
a clear basis for their claims. However we saw with the
flawed expert reports submitted by Oracle that Judge Alsup
will give them every opportunity to make a case that he can
rule upon.
The parties have always agreed that copyright protectability
of the APIs is a matter of law, and thus a question that
Judge Alsup will have to decide. If he does decide this in
Oracle's favor, it will then be required of the jury to
determine the factual question of what protectable elements
Google infringed (and by extension, what Classpath and
Harmony likely infringe as well). Even if the jury finds
that there was infringement, Google will still have defenses
to liability that the jury will have to consider (too
numerous to summarize easily, but fair use, laches, and
estoppel come to mind).
---
Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy (1927-2011)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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