As you can see from the Oracle expert testimony, the trial strategy was to draw a bright line between the freely available Java language (as laid out, e.g., the JLSpec book), and the API's which make the programming language useful.

So the battle was largely fought out over to what extent the declarations of classes (or API "packages" as Oracle wanted to call them, blurring the distinction between declaration and implementation) would qualify for copyright protection. Judge Alsup ruled at some point that mere names of API classes and methods were too short and too functional to qualify for copyright protection, and it was subsequently (after the jury deliberated on copyright infringement) decided by him that as a matter of law the declaration of APIs (as opposed to the code that implemented the libraries supporting them) did not qualify for copyright protection.

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Rosser's trick: "For every proof of me, there is a shorter proof of my negation".

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

• trouble is, there can be no bright line between java language and APIs - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 01:17 PM EDT
  • trouble is, there can be no bright line between java language and APIs - Authored by: xtifr on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 01:48 PM EDT
    • Thanks - Authored by: Steve Martin on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 09:42 PM EDT
    • trouble is, there can be no bright line between java language and APIs - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 08 2013 @ 07:24 PM EDT

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

• The difference - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 06:46 PM EDT
  • Constructed languages - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 08 2013 @ 03:08 AM EDT
• From a copyright perspective: it dun matter - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 08 2013 @ 10:46 AM EDT