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SSO meets API | 275 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
SSO meets API
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 01:30 AM EDT
SSO is legal jargon. API is tech jargon. Put them together and you get a jargon
monstrosity.

What is the SSO of an API? It isn't the names. It isn't the functional elements.
It isn't the documentation or the source code. Take those things out of an API
and what you've got left is ... ????????? ... some ... thing which .. supposedly
has a sequence structure and organisation ?????.

I have a headache. I pity the jury. I doubt they have any better idea of what
the SSO of an API might be than I do.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What Concerns Me
Authored by: sproggit on Tuesday, May 01 2012 @ 01:51 AM EDT
... comes from the way that the Judge's views did seem to move through the
trial, but prompted him to elect to send the jury out with instructions that SSO
as subject matter can be copyrighted.

As I often do - frequently with little success - I try and look at that decision
from the perspective of something else that is subject to the relevant law. So I
would ask myself how this decision would look if contemplated from the
perspective of let's say a poet, or a musician.

Using the first example - poetry - how would Oracle's argument stack up against
Google's position... Suppose we have two poems written about a willow tree. Both
are 2 lines and both are written in iambic pentameter, each with 5 verses of 4
lines each. Both poems use predictable rhyming pairs in the couplets - for
example below/willow, tree/see, high,sky and so on, even though other words in
the individual lines are different.

Now let's consider Oracle's SSO argument to this. Oracle are saying that Google
infringed Oracle's selection, structure and organisation. OK. Our two poems have
the same structure - 20 lines in 5 versus - check. They both use iambic
pentameter - check. [Note, it is irrelevant that neither poet in my example
invented iambic pentameter]. Both are written in the English language - check.
Both capitalize the first letter of each line of the poem - check. You see where
this is going.

We all know that these could be two completely different poems about willow
trees, with a different meaning and intent, different context and purpose. Yet
application of the judge's finding that SSO can be copyrighted would make a
mockery of poetry.


My second example will be painting. We have two artists who have produced a
portrait of a subject. In both cases the subject is sitting - check. In both
cases the subject is looking to one side [let's presume to the right as seen by
a viewer]. In both cases the subject is rendered in oils on canvas. In both
cases the subject is in a garden, with a backdrop of dappled leaves of a plant
that could be, for example, mimosa. Once again, depending upon how we choose to
describe these two works of art, one could be said to be a copy of the other.
But in reality, nothing may be further from the truth.


I chose these two examples [poetry and painting] very deliberately. Whilst
poetry [to a greater extent] and painting [less so] have formalities that the
artist may observe [iambic pentameter being an good example for poetry, and
different styles - such as cubism - for painting], both are relatively
free-format in their composition.

Software is different. Because the binary language understood by computers is so
precise, it demands precision from mere humans who attempt to converse in the
digital realm. That precision manifests as a tighter set of rules and syntax
that dictate structure and meaning. I once read, for example, that a mis-placed
comma sent one of the early spacecraft missions to Venus on a collision course
with the sun... In poetry or prose we would skip an extra comma as being either
a grammatical error of the artist or a printing mistake. In software, a program
would crash.

It is this inherent precision in the binary world of computers that actually
enforces similarity between software routines. It means that we are much more
likely to see substantial similarity between two computer programs than two
portrait paintings or two poems on the same topic.

It is driven by syntax, by the foundational principles of the Turing/Von Neuman
construct the the ultimately simplistic capabilities of the underlying device
which, as any student of microprocessor design will tell you, can ultimately
only add up two binary numbers. All processing is addition. That's all a CPU can
do. [ The clever part comes in the way that you combine this feature to achieve
other objectives ].



Sorry, this is turning in to a longer discourse than I intended. The bottom line
is I am nervous because I see this case bringing about a refinement in the law -
or the application of the law - instigated by well-meaning individuals [lawyers
and a judge] who grok the law but who perhaps don't fully grok the tech.

As the signature file of one of our esteemed colleagues so aptly puts it,
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard
to light!"

"Do not meddle in the affairs of software developers, because you will
bring the entire western civilization to a grinding halt until we can build
enough court rooms and hire enough judges to cope with the exponential growth in
pointless lawsuits."

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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