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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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He gets it! | 394 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
He gets it!
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 08:24 PM EDT
Well, you could look at this two ways. One is that the heirarchy and the names
are the same thing, and that names aren't copyrightable, so therefore neither is
the heirarchy.

But you could also (validly) say that in Java, the fully-qualified class name
*encodes* the heirarchy. In this view, the "name = heirarchy"
argument doesn't seem to actually lead to any legal conclusions.

The argument that troubles me the most is the collection argument. If I can
copyright a collection of items that are not individually copyrightable, then
why can't I copyright an API?

Now, in practice, this isn't a problem because every API that has been
re-implemented has promissory estoppel on it, and every API that will ever be
proposed after this case will have promissory estoppel, or nobody will touch it.
So the only stuff that's at risk is stuff that has a published API but only one
vendor. (Not C# or .Net - Mono gives us promissory estoppel.)

Note well: I am not a lawyer. Even more, I am not your lawyer. This is not
legal advice.

MSS2

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The names and the hierarchical organization are the same
Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 10:31 PM EDT
I agree. This is a big deal. I don't know if it will extend all the way to the entire SSO but it well might. If it does then that's the end of Oracle's API copyright case (at least in this court). With any luck, by the time Google is done there will be 4 or 5 different reasons why Oracle's copyright claims are bogus.

I do hope more of Oracle's lies get exposed to the jury. That will set the stage nicely for the patent part of the trial. The jury will already have a good idea of whom they can trust and whom the can't.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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