

Oracle wins Android-Java copyright appeal - yla92
http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/05/oracle-wins-android-java-copyright.html

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bryanlarsen
Note that the article was written by Florian Mueller, who is on the Oracle
payroll.

~~~
gamerdonkey
Days like this are when I really miss Groklaw. I refuse to click on a link to
FOSSPatents, and I don't have another reliable source for tech-legal news.

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stuki
The appeals court argument seems reasonable, if applied in a more typical
context of creative end user content. Mickey Mouse is copyrightable because
he's not just any old mouse, but rather a specific one.

But as for API's? Although Sun might have had choices, there is no a priori
added value derived from the specific choices they did make, other than the
fact that they have become standardized, so engineers are used to working with
them.

Mickey is Mickey because the specific qualities Disney gave him, in and of
itself makes him rather more interesting than some randomly chosen rodent.
Which language API's, as even the court (or the article author, I'm unclear)
acknowledges, generally are not.

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dctoedt
Appellate court decision:
[http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-
orders/...](http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-
orders/13-1021.Opinion.5-7-2014.1.PDF)

The appeals court looked to a decades-old "abstraction, filtration,
comparison" test. In essence, that test requires the judge and jury to play
the role of a patent examiner. See slip opinion at pages 23, 40. The expense
and uncertainty aren't much fun for either party (or for the judge, jury, and
law clerks for that matter). But yippee, say the IP litigators, because cases
like this require lots of billable hours.

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tzs
There's an important procedural aspect to this that I haven't seen mentioned
yet. This was appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, not
the 9th Circuit which is where copyright cases from the 9th Circuit would
normally go.

I believe that it ended up in the CAFC because it was also a patents case, and
CAFC handles all patent appeals from the Federal district courts.

This is significant because CAFC sets precedent for all circuits. If there had
been no patent case, so that the appeal would have went to the 9th Circuit
instead of the CAFC, then it would only set precedent for the 9th Circuit. The
Courts of Appeal in the other circuits might decide similar API copyright
cases differently, and then there would be a good chance the Supreme Court
would take up the issue to resolve the differences between the different
circuits.

The Supreme Court can, of course, still take up this issue, but they are much
more likely to take a case if there is split among the circuits. Here's the
Court's statement on this [1]:

    
    
        Review on a writ of certiorari is not a matter of
        right, but of judicial discretion. A petition for a
        writ of certiorari will be granted only for
        compelling reasons. The following, although neither
        controlling nor fully measuring the Court’s
        discretion, indicate the character of the reasons
        the Court considers:
    
        (a) a United States court of appeals has entered a
        decision in conflict with the decision of another
        United States court of appeals on the same important
        matter; has decided an important federal question in
        a way that conflicts with a decision by a state
        court of last resort; or has so far departed from
        the accepted and usual course of judicial
        proceedings, or sanctioned such a departure by a
        lower court, as to call for an exercise of this
        Court’s supervisory power;
    
        (b) a state court of last resort has decided an
        impor­ tant federal question in a way that
        conflicts with the decision of another state court
        of last resort or of a United States court of
        appeals;
    
        (c) a state court or a United States court of
        appeals has decided an important question of federal
        law that has not been, but should be, settled by
        this Court, or has decided an important federal
        question in a way that conflicts with relevant
        decisions of this Court.
    
        A petition for a writ of certiorari is rarely
        granted when the asserted error consists of
        erroneous factual findings or the misapplication of
        a properly stated rule of law.
    

[1]
[http://www.supremecourt.gov/ctrules/2010RulesoftheCourt.pdf](http://www.supremecourt.gov/ctrules/2010RulesoftheCourt.pdf)

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lucian1900
This is terrible news, one of the first decisions towards APIs being
copyrightable.

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yawz
So if Google had written a tiny portion of the Java API themselves then the
whole debate would have been over?

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loup-vaillant
There's something I can't fathom: Isn't Java supposed to have a Free Software
incarnation? How could Google possibly infringe on it's API if it's the case?

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boobsbr
Don't give Florian Mueller the pageviews.

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taylodl
I wonder what the implications might be to .NET? There's a large part of it's
library that's pretty much lifted straight from Java - both the good and the
bad. Flush with success might Oracle go after Microsoft next?

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devx
As we've seen with the recent patent case that reached the Supreme Court, once
again because the Federal Court overturned the lower Court's ruling, it seems
the Appeals Courts are a lot more inclined to be pro-patents, while the lower
Courts (other than the East-Texas ones) and the Supreme Court aren't.

That being said, I hope this forces Google to deprecate Java on Android and
start pushing developers to using Go. They should've been working on this
since the trial with Oracle started, and not rest on their laurels.

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chroem
Ugh, but Go is slow compared to Java and it's missing a lot of features.

Why not something like Mono? It's faster than their current Dalvik/ ART VM
_and_ it would allow for many more languages to be used natively than just
Java or Go.

~~~
rubinelli
The last time I looked, Mono was in an even more precarious legal situation
than Harmony, but who knows? Since Google is already paying Microsoft, they
might just work something out.

