

Oracle can't copyright parts of Java - court ruling - pmjordan
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/31/us-oracle-google-ruling-idUSBRE84U1BS20120531

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bgentry
Groklaw version: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4050490> /
<http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459>

I flagged this version in favor of groklaw's because TFA is very unclear and
misleading.

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ryanbraganza
from " [http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/31/3055620/oracle-java-api-
no...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/31/3055620/oracle-java-api-not-covered-
copyright-law) "

" Judge William Alsup ended the discussion today, ruling that the SSO of the
APIs is not covered under current copyright law — and dismissing Oracle's
related claims outright. "

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raverbashing
Thanks

TFA borders on _completely useless_

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taligent
Curious what impact (if any) this would have on open source licenses.

Given that Google effectively (and now legally) lifted Apache Harmony for
their own use does that mean I could do the same with any open source project
including those under GPL ?

~~~
davidw
Harmony was the work of the Apache Software Foundation, available under the
liberal Apache License. It's very different from the GPL.

~~~
taligent
I know what Harmony is and the difference between the licenses. But Oracle
asserted copyright despite the license.

But this case effectively means that code can not be copyrighted does it not ?
I was wondering whether that meant that the GPL's copyright restrictions still
applied.

~~~
jmj42
Oracle claimed that the APIs were under copyright protection (there was also a
claim or two about code, but that was resolved in phase one).

This decision means that the Structure, Sequence, and Organization (SSO) of an
API is not eligible for copyright protection. In short, in this case, it means
the specification that makes java java (as opposed to python, ruby, c, etc.)
can not be copyrighted.

Note, this does not refer to a document that contains the specification or an
implementation of java. Both of those are an expression of the SSO of the java
API, and can be protected by copyright.

