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| Authored by: Ian Al on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 11:17 AM EDT |
There will still be the opportunity to register an API as a single document or a
collection (both are permitted under the copyright law). That door has closed,
for all practical purposes, for Oracle.
If they register the Java API as a collection, they kill all public work of any
kind on the Java platform (if they have not already done so). Geeks won't ask
the lawyers what they can and can't do under the licence. They will just forget
Java ever existed.
For other APIs some idiot can sue either way and the issue becomes the
percentage of the whole work that was copied.
A future case will have to go over the law, yet again, that holds that an API is
not copyrightable because of merger of expression with function and all the
other issues already in case law.
I think that anyone from this day forth who wants to get a new API accepted by
the community will have to have a very well-written, free, open and permissive
licence to offer with the API.
Out of this case we get the important freedom from a judgement that the judge
has already made: you cannot copyright the ideas expressed in a document, even
if it is an API Specification document.
I'm waiting to see whether he starts to question whether one can copyright a
large number of ideas in a collection of documents. It's a bizarre situation,
but he is just about to ask the jury to decide just that.
The SSO is not in the individual copyright documents: it is a specific
collection of ideas. Are the ideas from 37 packages protectable by copyright.
How about 160+. Where is that in copyright law?
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- IMHO Neither - Authored by: PJ on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 11:47 AM EDT
- Gha! - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 12:25 PM EDT
- Doubtful - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 12:39 PM EDT
- IMHO Neither - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 02:08 PM EDT
- IMHO Neither - Authored by: calris74 on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 06:43 PM EDT
- PHBs - Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 05:42 AM EDT
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