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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 06:38 PM EDT |
If Oracle wins this case (by hook or crook) the results for the U.S. software
industry will be apocalyptically bad.
The rest of the world will probably rejoice, at least in the short term. But
the U.S. is alarmingly good at exporting their bad laws to other countries, so I
think if Oracle somehow wins this, then no one is safe from the potential
long-term bad effects.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: jbb on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 07:23 PM EDT |
When Alsup
denied Google's motion for summary judgment he
said:
“Words and short phrases such as names, titles, and slogans”
are “not subject to copyright.” 37 C.F.R. 202.1(a); Planesi v. Peters, No.
04-16936, slip op. at *1 (9th Cir. Aug. 15, 2005). Google argues that “the names
of the Java language API files, packages, classes, and methods are not
protectable as a matter of law” (Br. 17). This order agrees. Because names
and
other short phrases are not subject to copyright, the names of the various items
appearing in the disputed API package specifications are not protected. See Sega
Enters. Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, 1524 n.7 (9th Cir. 1992)
(“Sega’s security code is of such de minimis length that it is probably
unprotected under the words and short phrases
doctrine.”).
He might have said more elsewhere, perhaps at a
hearing, but the point Oracle made which the judge agreed with is the amount of
copying in Sega was orders of magnitude smaller than the copying here so the
judge ruled that Sega did not apply. IMO, this is why SSO got past summary
judgment; what was copied in Sega was so small that it didn't have any SSO and
thus the Sega decision does not speak to SSO.
---
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 | # ]
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| Authored by: hardmath on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 10:27 PM EDT |
That's my take as well, PJ. Presumably Judge Alsup buys the principle that APIs
made available for calling are not protectable for independent implementation.
But this is a major leap forward in clarity, and to preserve the progress of the
case against a possible reversal at the appellate level, he's taking the
roundabout way.
I'm convinced that if he didn't buy Google's argument, he would have already
ruled in that fashion, since an appellate overturning of that ruling would leave
little for the lower court to rehear.
--hm
---
"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem
prover." -- Richard O'Keefe[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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