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| Authored by: cricketjeff on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 10:49 AM EDT |
broad patent claims are almost always invalid but a copyright on a compilation
is valid, just not particularly useful.
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There is nothing in life that doesn't look better after a good cup of tea.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 11:54 AM EDT |
Just my personal opinion so far: when you
change your argument with the passing winds,
without checking carefully the law underpinning
your new position first, you end up with egg
on your face.
Remember how SCO claimed copyright infringement
by Linux and there was no copyright registration
until later? Details matter. But when you are
flying by the seat of your pants, you can drop
a stitch.
Or, more simply, don't take the other side of
Robert Van Nest. He's really awesome. You don't
see lawyering like we are watching every day.
I'm not predicting the outcome. But for sure, Google
is getting its money's worth. And the community can
be satisfied that whatever happens, Google fought
with the best there is. And they deserve credit
for doing this. Unfortunately, both copyright law
and patent law were written for the past. They don't
match digital living very well. And a lot of judges
don't really understand the technical needs of
computers and software. They are thinking stealing
stuff, like taking an article and selling it as
yours, or recording a song that uses someone else's
melody and just doing new words and pretending you
wrote the melody. They don't yet understand the
unique properties of writing software. But Google
has done a good job of explaining APIs to this
judge. What else can they do?
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| Authored by: xtifr on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 03:22 PM EDT |
I think (though I'm willing to hear counterarguments) that they did the right
thing with the registration. Where they made the mistake was suing Google over
all this (the copyrights, I mean).
The second mistake Oracle made was hurrying the trial. They did that because of
the patents, of course, and if you take that into consideration, the hurry was
smart, but as far as the copyrights go, hurrying the copyright portion of the
trial seems to have just resulted in both sides presenting unclear, muddled
arguments--but especially Oracle.
If they'd had time to sort through the copyright issues, I think it's quite
possible that most of them would have gone away--which is likely to happen
anyway--but Oracle wouldn't have looked quite as much like a buffoon to the
general public.
Oracle's ultimate problem is that they (and/or Sun) have been trying to prevent
"fragmentation" through the clever use of copyrights, patents, and
trademarks, none of which are designed for that purpose. It's like the GPL
being designed to use copyright law to enforce public access to code, but unlike
the GPL, Sun/Oracle didn't get all their ducks lined up properly, and they
didn't end up enforcing what they wanted.
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Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to
light.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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