Yes, the judge proposed the jury instruction:
you do not need to be
concerned with structure, sequence, and
organization, a concept that applies
only to the compilable code part of the case.
But that was only
after both sides argued over the point. Oracle, in their reply to the judge
said that the SSO of the manual is protected and its infringement should be
decided by the jury.
The reason I say you might have things upside down is
your claim that SSO only applies to programs and not literary works. This is
simply not true. In fact, if anything, Oracle is trying to apply the protection
of SSO in literary works to APIs. A prime example is the plot-line for a movie.
If you shop a script to a movie studio and they turn around and use only your
plot then you have a good chance of successfully suing them even though only the
SSO was copied. Oracle might have actually used this analogy.
IMO the
SSO of a program is much less likely to be protectable than the SSO of a
literary work because there are functionality constraints in programs that don't
exist in works of fiction. This case is a perfect example. The SSO of the
compilable code in Google's API implementations are very similar to the overall
SSO of Oracle's implementations. There is a very good reason for this. Both
implementations are doing the exact same thing but doing it in different ways.
Google is using this same defense to explain the similarities in the
manuals. If the manuals had instead been works of fiction then the similarity
of the SSO would have made the copyright claims a slam-dunk for Oracle
IMO.
---
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 | # ]
| 
