| I agree with you that this Supreme Court gets a lot of things wrong. Whenever
it is a question of corporate rights versus personal rights, the people always
lose. If this case went along those lines then I would agree with you that it
would be best to not ask the Supreme Court to decide the issue.
But this is a
case of corp. versus corp.
You said:
But from some other
peoples' perspectives, the right answer is obvious too -- albeit 180 degrees
from what I consider to be the right answer.
Of course, for
almost any statement, no matter how absurd, you can find a vanishingly small
percentage of people who will agree with it. Your statement is only meaningful
in this context if it it includes the implication that a significant percentage
of people (let's say greater than 15%) hold that opinion.
If you actually
think this is true then perhaps you can provide significant examples of people
who hold that opinion who are not:
- paid to have it, or
- stand to
make tons of money if Alsup's ruling is overturned.
I include many lawyers
in the second category.
The main point is that I don't see this as a
left versus right issue or a corporate rights versus personal rights issue. I
am convinced that the lack of case law which forced this issue to go to trial
resulted from the fact that almost everyone already agreed that APIs could not
be protected by copyright. If a significant percentage of people disagreed then
there would have been more API copyright cases in the courts because there is no
doubt that all sorts of APIs have been copied freely and openly for decades.
The whole notion of clean-room development is premised on the idea that APIs
cannot be copyrighted.
I agree with you that there is lots of room
for courts to get this issue wrong. I think Alsup totally nailed it. I also
believe that almost any court, even our Supreme Court, would have a very hard
time overturning Alsup's ruling. I agree that the possibility of a bad ruling
is not zero but I think it is small. As I said before, I think there would be a
huge scandal if the SCotUS overturned this ruling on anything except a
horrendously glaring technicality.
---
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 | # ]
|
