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| Authored by: stend on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 01:56 PM EDT |
| Could the judge have been trying to avoid setting a precedent on the
copyrightability of APIs? ---
Please see bio for disclaimer. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 02:07 PM EDT |
What the Judge apparently tried to do (and it was a worthwhile idea, even though
it seems to have not worked out very well) was get the jury trial done first and
avoid committing to any uncertain legal ruling (such as the copyrightability of
SSO's) until after the jury had "found their facts". The idea being,
that if the Judge's ruling was overturned on appeal, the "facts" found
by the jury would still be valid, and they wouldn't need to then have *another*
lengthy and expensive jury trial.
Unfortunately, the case got so twisted in legal nonsense (with a lot of help
from Oracle, and without Google doing too much to stem the tide) and the jury
are now faced with the near-impossible task of discovering a set of
"facts" out of the extremely complex picture that was woven for them,
in which several main elements (such as the copyrightability of SSO of APIs) are
very nebulous and non-sensical.
The risk of doing a bench trial first, is that if some of the legal rulings from
the bench trial were overturned on appeal, it might invalidate the jury trial
and result in a completely new jury trial. If the Judge had understood the
technical stuff well enough to feel certain he was on solid legal ground, he
might have ruled early and saved everyone a lot of anguish. But instead he
wasn't sure, so he decided to wait and see what came out at trial before making
his decision. Leading us into this weird "but-for" world where nobody
understands what exactly Google is accused of or why it was an infringement, and
the entire software industry is looking on in horror because the consequences of
Oracle winning would range somewhere between Pandora's Box and The Great Flood.
But even if they lose, this case might fail to set a proper strong precedent and
we might all be dragged through this same mess again a few years from now.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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