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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Corporate personhood | 219 comments | Create New Account
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Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 03:08 PM EST
No Oracle shouldn't win.

We _have_ thought rationally about it, and it would upend software development
as we know it if they win.

That's where the emotion comes from -- after rationally analyzing it, we cannot
believe that Oracle could attempt to do that to the world.

If you think the emotion came first, and then we are rationalizing it, you're
completely wrong.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Already settled
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 03:35 PM EST
Sun sued Microsoft, not for making their own Java, but for calling it Java when
it broke the spec. Microsoft had to change the name.

Sun already said they had no problem with Android, because it was called
Android, not Java.

And their example of Ann Droid stealing Harry Potter fails for the same
reason... Ann called it Harry Potter: Google didn't call it Java.

Sorry Larry, but David is simply stringing you along for $$$$. Ask Ralph Yarro
how that turns out.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 03:36 PM EST
Ora Claw wants to publish a bestseller. So she does and copyrights page
turning, page numbers, hard covers, individual words, letters, etc.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 03:48 PM EST
What is the law about copying outlines? Suppose I copied the
outline (headings, subheadings, etc.) of an entry in the
Encyclopedia Britannica but filled in the body text and then
posted the result on Wikipedia. Would that violate copyright?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 03:56 PM EST
>Google did make a 1:1 copy of the entire Java API, all interfaces and
libraries.

No. The interface (in other words, the formal part of the language definition),
Google DID copy. That would be the API. The libraries, Google did NOT copy.

The difference is extremely important. The interfaces, being solely functional,
aren't copyrighteable anyway--and had been widely copied (by every single Java
programmer on earth, as well as by multiple independent Java implementations) --
all with Sun's blessing. There's even an ISO standard of them!

And Microsoft did NOT do the same thing. (1) They DID copy (and change) the
libraries (for which as it happens they had a license (2) they DID call the
incompatible result Java (which was a violation of the license.

With the wrong facts, you are going to draw the wrong conclusions regardless of
your emotional state.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

That Mr. Anonymous has an opinion contrary to the district court judge is noted
Authored by: dio gratia on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 05:27 PM EST
Without supporting citations of statute or case law the basis for your opinion
can be neither supported or refuted.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle repeatedly fails to properly secure Java, Sun did a better job.
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 05:42 PM EST
I wonder if Oracle software is that vulnerable to hackers.

"The hundreds or thousands of career Sun developers who wrote these
packages are
employed by Oracle now and are still maintaining," OR NOT.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Sun did not sue Microsoft for copying Java
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 06:34 PM EST
They sued Microsoft for taking a contract, then changing the Java interfaces and
still calling the product Java.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Corporate personhood
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 13 2013 @ 06:38 PM EST
I agree with you that companies are not people, unfortunately, the Unites States
Supreme Court says they are.

That's not the point. The point is that there is longstanding legal
interpretation that says interfaces cannot be copyrighted. Maybe you think they
should be, but you do not get to change the law. If you care about tech, you
had better hope that the court's do not ever agree with you, because sofware
development is impossible if interfaces are copyrighted.

I dare you to write me a Java program that does anything without copying parts
of what is in the Java header files.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: PJ on Thursday, February 14 2013 @ 04:01 AM EST
Google emphatically did not do that. You
read the brief, I take it, and believed it.

We also have a rule on Groklaw, namely that
if you work for a company an article is about,
you need to say so.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Steve Martin on Thursday, February 14 2013 @ 06:34 AM EST

Google did make a 1:1 copy of the entire Java API, all interfaces and libraries.

That is not what they alleged at trial:

In developing Android, Google employees and contractors deliberately copied the 37 Java API design specifications, containing the fundamental structure for much of the Java core class libraries.

(emphasis added) They did not claim that Google copied "all interfaces and libraries".

The hundreds or thousands of career Sun developers who wrote these packages are employed by Oracle now and are still maintaining, improving, and expanding the very very large Java OpenJDK Project.

And the very claim that Oracle is employing some of these developers to maintain the OpenJDK project (a body of code distributed under GPLv2) doesn't raise a conflict in your thesis that Oracle deserves to prevail on copyright infringement?

---
"When I say something, I put my name next to it." -- Isaac Jaffe, "Sports Night"

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 14 2013 @ 03:02 PM EST
APIs cannot be copyrighted... period.

It's already been declared as such in EU.
<Opinion - not fact - protected by 1st Ammendment> Once the judges spend
all the money they've been bribed with here, it will be ruled the same in the
U.S.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oracle Files Appeal Brief in Oracle v. Google ~pj
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 14 2013 @ 10:26 PM EST
Well, it is your opinion. That it seems to be supported by mistaken
assertions might trouble you.

It was not 1:1.

Google actually had hired many of the engineers behind java. Sun stopped
being a fun place and so folks moved on to the company that was doing the
cool new. Talent does that.

Before java had boxing and parameterized collections, I made an IntList
class which was variable in length. I implemented some of the List
interface.
So where exactly did I get my permission to do so if the Oracle theory is
valid? What of the wisdom in programming to interfaces? It falls apart if
every interface is a work of creative expression as then every program is a
derivative work requiring a license from those who copy and build upon
language and library interfaces. Programmers know the hard work, the
place where bugs become dragons, is in the implementation code and that
was different, though there was that bit of code written by the Google
engineer who had written it for Sun back when he was their employee.
Indeed, it was a simple guard that checked if an array access was out of
range. Not really code that would look different if two capable programmers
wrote it.

Java's original libraries in organization and signature borrowed from
SmallTalk, Objective C, and C++.

My opinion is that the parties should have worked something out. Google
did climb on top of the shoulders of a giant. But, it didn't happen and blame
has to be shared equally that a deal didn't get done. I do not want Oracle's
argument to prevail because I think the licensing claims it will produce will
quickly rise to second place behind patents as things that make
programming no fun.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

You forgot your 'sarcasm' tags!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 15 2013 @ 07:56 AM EST
Without them, folks around here are going to conclude (perhaps rightly)
that you are just trolling.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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