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| Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 04:58 AM EDT |
If you register a collection, even if you don't own the copyrights on some of
the components, you have standing to protect that whole work. However, the
individual components can only be protected by the automatic copyright that
comes without registration.
If you copy all of the RedHat collection (they don't own the copyright to the
Linux kernel - not a lot of people know that) then you infringe on their
registered collection copyright.
If you copy the kernel, well, they don't own that and it is the true copyright
owner who gets to protect that. Make that owners, because the kernel is not one
document and lots of folk have copyright to documents in the kernel.
Redhat cannot assert that any combination of GNU tools, Linux kernel and xwindow
infringes on their registered collection. It's just as well, really. So, a court
will have to see very substantial copying, perhaps including lots of components
of which RedHat own the copyright, before there is even de minimus copying of
the registered copyright collection as a whole work.
If Redhat want to stop people using the API to the enterprise stack in their
version of Linux, they have to do that on the basis of individual copyrights
that they own. That law is clear. They can only protect the creative expression
fixated in the medium of a single document. They cannot protect the ideas formed
by putting a whole load of protected documents into an enterprise bucket and
saying that the combination of all the creative expression fixated in all the
collection of documents forms a new whole protected work. The law does not agree
with them. If you want to protect a collection, the only way is to register the
whole work of the collection.
So, the law does not protect an API Specification that is not fixated in a
single document unless all the documents of the API are in a registered
collection. If the API Specification is in a single document, then the
individual methods are functional and implementing the methods is using ideas
and not copying creative expression as the judge has already decided.
For a single document, there is still the SSO that might, just, be protected if
the copyright holder of the document is the one bringing the case.
The Java API Specification is not registered as a whole collection. The
Specification is not in a single document. Each of the 160+ packages has
hundreds of individual documents within it. Oracle do not own, or cannot assert,
the copyright in all the documents.
The creative expression in a large number of documents is not theirs even though
they own the copyright because the creativity comes from predecessor languages
like C++.
On every front, the law prevents them from asserting ownership of the Structure,
Sequence and Organisation of an unregistered collection of copyright documents,
many of which they do not own the copyright and many of which do not have
protectable copyright material fixated within them.
If Google implemented 10,000 ideas from within 5.000 copyright documents, the
law offers no protection to Oracle of those ideas, either singly or together as
a collection of ideas.
That's what Google did. They implemented a very large number of ideas that
together look like the implementation of a language. As long as they did not
infringe on a language trademark ('we scrubbed 'java' from the files wherever it
was not essential to the implementation') then Google did nothing wrong under
the law.
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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