The bottom line: no infringement. Did Sun and Oracle have a copyright on
the
documentation they publish, some of it in books and e-books, and some of
it on
web pages? Yes. How could one infringe? One way would be to scan the or
re-
typesetting the text verbatim and put these things into a one's
commercially
sold Java textbook.
That is clearly where there was access to the
author's work and substantial
copying, which likely to be beyond the bounds of
fair use, and thus, require a
license from the author. What did
Google
do? Well, they looked at an Apache project, called Harmony, and used its
documentation in order to form the skeletal outline of a key, but minority,
part
of the language, library, and virtual machine for Android, with "key"
meaning
the few
packages of the java language
which would provide a degree
of comfort and compatibility for an experienced
java programmer. Oracle was
trying to sell the jury on the idea that
copying of
someone's copy of the
skeleton of Apache's independent and substantially
different
non-derivative
work was tantamount to copying from the full body of Sun's
original work. The
jury could have said non-infringing for various reasons. I
would have said
non-infringing because a language is not documentation and
the documentation
that Google has provided does not look to be copied from
Oracle's
documentation.As to the original question, if a published
work is
protectable by copyright, it is so whether it was generated by one person in a
den, a team of five-year-olds, an audio card writing to a file the output from
a
program that generates musical notes via a random process filtered by
probabilistic analyses of Mozart's compositions, or a program that filters
source
code. What has to be kept clear is the difference between the published
work,
which may be copyrighted, and the ideas, which may not. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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