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| Authored by: hardmath on Sunday, April 22 2012 @ 08:39 AM EDT |
My guess is that while the parties agreed Judge Alsup should rule as to the
copyrightabilty of the APIs, it was necessary for him to hear the facts bearing
on what the Structure, Selection, and Organization (SSO) of the APIs (as opposed
to the noninfringed elements) before he could frame his decision as to
copyrightability, and thus frame his instructions to the jury, _if_ needed, as
to deciding whether those copyrights were infringed.
Torturous? Yes, and the remarks we seen reported seem to me to bear out Judge
Alsup's unhappiness with this situation. I've suspected him of having
telegraphed to Oracle with said remarks that they need to present something
substantative about SSO, not merely the general importance of designing APIs or
difficulty in doing so.
In my opinion Google has shown the API declarations are essential to using the
Java programming language, and the substantial similarity of the 37 accused APIs
to the subset of the Java APIs is not more than required for interoperability,
i.e. agreement as to method signatures and agreement with Harmony.
The best case for Oracle would be if Judge Alsup rules that Sun or Oracle could
have copyrighted the API declarations and that it's a question of fact for the
jury as to whether failure to defend (or articulate) those claims against GNU's
Classpath or Apache's Harmony is sufficient defense for Google.
The best case for Google and the software community as a whole would be for
Judge Alsup to rule the publicly available API declarations (as opposed to their
documentation or their implementation) is not protectable as a method of
operation or something similar under the merger doctrine. This would leave a
little something for the jury to decide. What about the 9 lines of rangeCheck
code? What about the similarities in documentation?
regards, hm
---
Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense. -- John McCarthy (1927-2011)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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