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| Authored by: mtew on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 09:53 PM EDT |
If the APIs cannot be copyrighted, the GPL will not make any real difference, at
least in this case.
The power of copyright law is that it controls who can legally make copies. If
something is not copyright-able, the law can not be used to prevent making
copies. Also, the law can not be used to extract fees for making copies of
un-copyright-able material. At worst, the only thing lost would be the
requirement that someone who modified an API might have to publish those
modifications.
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MTEW[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 21 2012 @ 10:58 PM EDT |
The GPL is a copyright licence, I very much hope that the judge is
going to rule
they can't be copyright and therefore cannot be
GPLed.
Presumably what is properly copyrighted (and offered under
GPL) is an implementation of them.
Judge Alsup seems like he's
catching on to the distinction.
Changing Android to utilize the GPL license
offered (the reasons it was not used were mostly out of vendor fear rather than
substance) might be one practical workaround for Oracle's novel claim of a
copyright on the APIs themselves, but it would be an ironic one as in a world
where APIs can be copyrighted, the GPL probably doesn't get invented as the
license for a re-implementation of UNIX APIs that would not have been happening.
And we don't really want to argue that offering the GPL license means Sun
assigned Java a negligible monetary value or put it into the public domain
(since all the effort that has been put into preserving the distinction between
the public domain and GPL would be lost). So the GPL thing may well be
irrelevant, except as a backup plan to salvage android should Oracle
inexplicably prevail on the question of API copyrightability. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 03:43 PM EDT |
> can't be copyright and therefore cannot be GPLed.
There is nothing to stop them being GPLed. It would just mean that the GPL could
not be enforced.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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