That's the point that I think is being oversold here on
Groklaw.
Over several days of testimony, nobody from Sun's
side ever said "we wrote the
Java API spec"??? On the
contrary, there were books submitted into
evidence
describing the spec - Sun employees wrote at least one of
those
books.
The problem is, writing a book on the spec isn't the same as
writing the spec. If java.foo.bar(la,ti,da) came from Objective Pascal, it would
still be included in the book on the spec. Authorship of the individual APIs has
to be shown - especially since many of the math APIs are copied from other,
earlier, OOP languages.
To expand, the math package contains a series of APIs
related to math functions:
- real min(list);
- real max(list);
- real
average(list);
- real log(real);
- etc....
Oracle's problem is they
registered the entire work, the whole package, but they are only suing over max
& average. Great, but they've said "we didn't write all of this & we
don't own all of it." Somewhere along the line, they forgot to show that they
do, in fact, own max & average.
Because they forgot, they are stuck with
either abandoning the whole copyright thing, or pointing to the whole 15M lines
of Android & saying "See, they copied 9 lines of code and it's not de
minimus because it's a huge portion of the whole work." ---
You patented
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