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| Authored by: sproggit on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 01:11 PM EDT |
I see both sides of this argument, but the implications of the decision to
instruct a jury to consider SSO to be worthy of copyright "for the purpose
of deliberations" may have significant ramifications that we can not yet
foresee.
With that statement, this Court effectively set a legal precedent. Depending
entirely on how this case goes [and it is inevitable there will be appeals] the
decision may be quoted in future attacks against the FLOSS community.
In other words, we can't just contemplate this move by the Court with respect to
OracleUSA vs. Google, we have to consider it re-applied in any number of
different ways in future.
Oracle are trying to re-write history for a period when Sun, not Oracle, owned
the rights to JAVA. They have done a remarkably good job of that so far, but the
basic legal precedents *should* go in Google's favour.
Personally, I am quite surprised that they chose to argue for a mis-trial on the
basis of the jury's findings from the Copyright phase. However unpleasant that
it may be, I would have thought that a stronger legal position would be to argue
that the jury instructions were wrong in the first place, on the basis that the
Court's decision to instruct the jury that the SSO of the API could be subject
to copyright protection has no basis in fact or law... I can only speculate as
to why they did not so argue; my suspicion would be that they simply did not
wish to annoy the Court any more than absolutely necessary at this point in
time. Provided that they can reserve the right to bring this and other
objections to the table later [without being subject to the accusation from
Oracle that they had an opportunity to object and chose to remain silent] then I
can only hope that they know what they are doing.
After being a Groklaw lurker since before the site moved to ibiblio, I can only
say that this case is surprising to me because I am so very disappointed in the
lack of precision of Google's defense. But what do I know? Not a lot...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: darrellb on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 01:12 PM EDT |
Clearly the Court should have decided what was copyrighted and what was not, and
why, before seating a jury.
Judicial economy this isn't. The Court could have saved days of trial time, not
to mention the inevitable appeals, motions, briefs.
I wonder if the Court exceeded discretion by allowing the jury to consider
infringement of something that as a matter of lay may not be copyrightable.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: alansz on Thursday, May 10 2012 @ 03:07 PM EDT |
Actually, I think if the jury decided that it was fair use that wouldn't relieve
the judge from the decision on copyrightability at all. Fair use only applies if
the material is copyrightable, so ISTM the judge would have to so rule in order
to apply the fair use verdict.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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