
Oracle copied Amazon’s API – was that copyright infringement? - callwaiting
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/01/oracle-copied-amazons-api-was-that-copyright-infringement/
======
smiljo
Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and
the Google one.

> Did Oracle infringe Amazon's copyright here? Ars Technica contacted Oracle
> to ask them if they had a license to copy Amazon's S3 API. An Oracle
> spokeswoman said that the S3 API was licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.
> She pointed us to the Amazon SDK for Java, which does indeed come with an
> Apache 2.0 license.

> However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that
> implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and
> the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders.

While I'm not a lawyer and didn't study the Google case in that much detail, I
don't see how they can claim that their own Java APIs can be copyrighted, and
then defending their copying of Amazon's API on the grounds that an SDK using
it is open source. I would think they could just look at the documentation,
and skip the SDK altogether. :)

~~~
twblalock
> Seems like Oracle is taking totally contradictory positions in this case and
> the Google one.

As a legal strategy, that's not a problem, and in fact it's what lawyers are
supposed to do: make the best possible arguments they can in any case they are
a part of. It should not be interpreted as a case of corporate schizophrenia
-- it's just the lawyers doing their jobs.

This can lead to contradictory positions if multiple cases are going on at the
same time. That's fine. The legal system is designed around the assumption
that this will happen.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I think at Supreme Court level such a contradiction could be a (minor)
problem, because the economic consequences of API copyrightability without
fair use play a big role in that case. If Oracle's use of Amazon's API was
based on an industry-wide fair use assumption that has supported the
industry's economic viability over decades that could damage their argument.

However, I think that Oracle would argue that there is no contradiction.

In the case now before the US Supreme Court, Oracle argues that software
copyrights do extend to the interface/API and that reimplementing the
interface does not constitute fair use.

With regard to Amazon's API, Oracle argues that the license grants them
permission to reimplement the interface.

This argument doesn't rely on disputing copyrightability of APIs or on fair
use. It simply says that copyright holders get to decide whether or not
reimplementation is permitted.

~~~
ratel
Oracle will argue anything as long as it suites them. That seems to be the
nature of modern litigation.

Fact in this matter is that the license for the Amazon API does allow the API
to be copied. But Oracle did and does not follow the license, because the
required attribution is missing. They are therefor not protected by the
license. It is like using an illegal copy of Windows and claiming you had the
right to use it under the license for the small omission of not having paid
for it.

Even if the change the code to include attribution they are still liable for
significant damages to Amazon for the period preceding the correction. Amazon
can claim to them the attribution is a very significant part of the license
agreement: It would deter competitors having to advertise Amazon and tell
their customers that their product was actually invented by someone having a
competing product.

Google can claim their fair use was actually already common practice, as most
of us thought. Even Oracle itself assumed and acted on that assumption that
copying APIs was fair use / not copyrightable and did not require following a
license agreement, as they did not. Worst case for Google is that they should
not have to pay significant damages for something they and others would see as
a common mistake and Oracle's reversal complying with the Amazon license is
proof that there was no established judicial practice to follow.

So Oracle is in a pickle: Either they claim copying the Amazon API was fair-
use, or APIs are not copyrightable and they lose the case against Google. Or
they claim that the license of Amazon allowed for copying of the API and they
violated that license. The harder they push Google in the later case the
bigger the risk Amazon will claim their share of Oracle's pie in return.
Better get the spreadsheets out.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Oracle claims to be in compliance with the license. In my opinion, that's all
they need to do in order to completely separate the two cases and make it
clear that they are not relying on a fair use defense. It doesn't matter
whether or not they are eventually found to be in breach of Amazon's license.

Also, the potential damages in these two cases are presumably very different.
Google built an entire industry on top of Android whilst Oracle is limping
along with a me-too cloud offering, some tiny part of which uses Amazon's API.
So I think Oracle would gladly take the risk of losing that case if they can
win the other one.

~~~
voxic11
But the license is for an SDK that talks to the API not the API itself which
is what they reimplemented. It's like if Google claimed that since Oracle once
released an Apache licenced Java application that means they can reimplement
any Java APIs that application used.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
My point is that Oracle doesn't have to be right in their potential dispute
with Amazon. All they have to do is use a defense that does not rely on
denying copyrightability of APIs or on fair use. And that's what they are
doing by referring to the SDK license.

------
dlgeek
I don't understand how Oracle's position here about how the Apache license
covering code covers the API and their position in Oracle vs. Google.

~~~
saghm
Their position seems pretty straightforward; other people should have to pay
them money, but they shouldn't have to pay other people money. They have this
same position on pretty much everything else too.

~~~
notlukesky
I don’t understand why stating the facts is cause for being downvoted?? The
hypocrisy is well known and documented.

~~~
tapland
It doesn't need to be stated. From reading the more detailed comments about
the cases one can draw their conclusions.

There is no need for simple 'because they are evil'-comments. It doesn't help
discussion.

~~~
opless
Maybe it does?

A causal reader might not be aware of how hypocritical certain operators are
in the IT space and are reading this for the first time.

Just because it's obvious TO YOU doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone.

Though I do agree that lots of "because they're evil" comments do not add to
the discussion.

Personally I think downvoting should be done carefully and not because the
downvoter disagrees with the comment.

~~~
nurettin
Since we are on the meta side of HN usage, I'm really curious about why people
here take time off to discuss their opinions at length. I occasionally throw
an idea or two out there to test what sort of response they would get, but
trying to convince someone out of their firmly held beliefs by arguing with
them at length in the threads? That looks like a complete waste and it is
unsettlingly abundant. Especially when the topic is a grey area where stakes
are high. High for someone else of course. Not the people who discuss these
things.

~~~
pas
Hm, it sometimes helps to organize thoughts to form a sort of well-rounded
argument. I like reading similar comments from others. (A sort of bigger
picture exposition, and/or a detailed technical walk-through that demonstrates
some point(s).)

Usually these comments are much more concise than whatever fluff article is
linked. (Or they provide some required context for posts that are very much in
need of it.)

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Pandabob
This is wildly off-topic, but I don't understand how Oracle still makes money.
Who are their customers? What are they selling to them and what's their
comparative advantage? Do they make money off of MySQL? Java? Are they selling
services? I don't get how they're still in business.

~~~
syshum
I know many companies that just sent them 5-6 Figure checks to license JRE....

They also have Lots of Med to Large organizations using a number of their
products, a lot of them are Oracle customers simply because they were using
products that oracle acquired and since they are now entrenched into the
business process it is easier to keep paying Oracle than extract those
products with alternatives

~~~
Pandabob
Interesting. I wonder how threatened Oracle's business is by the big cloud
providers, Amazon and Microsoft specifically? I guess not enough to reflect it
on the stock price.

------
monocasa
I wonder who owns SQL. I hope IBM has been asking them this as well.

~~~
grzm
> _" I wonder who owns SQL."_

I don't know what it would mean for someone to "own SQL". It's an ISO
standard:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#Interoperability_and_stand...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#Interoperability_and_standardization)

~~~
gpm
What does being an "ISO standard" have to do with anything? The law does not
make exceptions for things the ISO chose to standardize.

In fact, if Oracle is right, the ISO is likely violating the copyright of the
original authors of SQL by even publishing that standard.

~~~
flomo
Almost certainly IBM was a major contributor to the SQL standard. Since the
entire point of a "standard" is to encourage third-party adoption, so it would
rather difficult to sue anyone, imo.

Sun set up a certification process for Java, but specifically had different
rules for mobile applications, because that's where they were trying to make
money. Not that I agree with Oracle's argument, but it was very willful on
Google's part to avoid licensing.

tldr; SQL is _not_ analogous to Android.

~~~
gpm
I'm not sure, but as far as I know there isn't any way to accidentally grant a
license to copyrighted material. Even if there is it is almost certainly all
sorts of things that everyone but IBM really won't like, for instance,
revokable.

And of course no one thought to ask for a real license, because no one thought
it was copyrightable.

Willful on Google's part to avoid licensing is sort of synonyms with saying
Google willfully complied with the law... I'm not sure how it's relevant.

~~~
flomo
It is the _most_ relevant thing when judges started disagreeing with Google's
take on the law. Sun wanted money for X, Google didn't want to pay for X. (And
IBM didn't want money for SQL.)

~~~
gpm
The only thing it could possibly be relevant for is if Google tried to argue
that they _accidentally_ copied the sequence structure and organization of the
API. No one is arguing that. Of course that was intentional.

It _definitely_ isn't relevant to the rest of this discussion... you're
comparing the attitude of the _producer_ of the allegedly copyrighted material
in one case to the attitude of the _infringer_ of the allegedly existing
copyright in another.

~~~
flomo
Well, Google is probably going to have to pay Oracle a lot of money, so I
guess you can wander around mumbling about _relevancy_ , despite whatever
facts are noted by the courts.

------
gregorygoc
Can I patent open/read/write/close methods? I might have an idea for the
greatest troll in modern era.

~~~
Spivak
No, because a patent would only cover your novel implementation of those
functions.

You can't copyright them either in the same way that Harry Potter is
copyrighted but not the word 'the' which is used throughout.

------
kalium-xyz
Just to be clear, you can get away with this?

~~~
o-__-o
to be clear, there is nothing illegal with reverse engineering something. the
burden is on the plantiff to prove infrigement (uphill battle). the problem is
when the source code with an unfriendly license is made available then the
question becomes is the new implementation infringing the work of the
original. oracle v google is tough because google basically took java and
executed 's/Java/GoogleJava/g'.

the amazon plea is different because amazon published their SDK AND gave it a
permissive license. further oracle is not looking at the S3 code to figure out
how to implement the API, they must implement the functionality of the API
based off guesses of the client SDK.

~~~
gpm
The permissive license here does not matter, since Oracle did not comply with
the extremely liberal terms of the license.

The implementation of Java and the implementation of the AWS API does not
matter, since the Oracle-Google suit is (at this point) strictly over the
structure sequence and organization of the APIs. How the code implementing the
API came to be is completely and wholly irrelevant to the suit at hand.

Not that it matters (as explained above), but you're also wrong that google
took java and executed 's/java/GoogleJava/g'. They re-implemented the entire
API in dispute by hand, the only portion they copied from Oracle's
implementation was the API.

------
tingletech
Did they copy the API, or, are they using open source software to implement
the API?

------
chunsj
This is why we should use free software and not just open source one. And the
importance of GPL3 for the humanity.

~~~
matheusmoreira
The GPL was created partly in reaction to copyright protection being extended
to source code. Copyleft licenses subvert copyright by forcing all involved to
do the opposite of what they'd normally do with a copyrighted work.

The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much
time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally
broken system.

~~~
ms4720
Why? Should not content creators make a fair profit on their content? This
includes books and movies. If you read Stallman's early writings on the matter
his goal was to have software development funded and directed by the
government, so no linux or bsds for example.

~~~
matheusmoreira
Creators need to figure out how to get paid _before_ their works are created.
Perhaps patronage via services like Patreon is the way to go.

If we keep relying on copyright, we'll eventually lose everything that makes
computers great. Copyright infringement is trivial because we own our machines
and have full control over the software that runs on them. Governments and the
copyright industry are growing increasingly hostile to the idea that citizens
should be able to run whatever software they want. Therefore, maintaining the
illusion that information is scarce is fundamentally incompatible with the
freedoms envisioned by Stallman's licenses, especially the latest versions.

This API copyright issue also threatens competing free software
implementations of proprietary APIs. Projects like Wine should be directly
affected by the court's decision.

------
michaelgiba
Amazon did the same thing to MongoDB by replicating their API and as far as I
know there hasn’t been any successful litigation on Mongos behalf

~~~
whoisthisfor
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-
int...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/mongodb-introduction)

Others do this

------
warmfuzzykitten
What a stupid premise. The Apache version 2 license permits, well, pretty much
any use of the software, source or binary. The Sun/Oracle copyrights do not.

~~~
franga2000
The Apache license applies to the Java SDK (== the Java library Amazon made to
help developers use their (HTTP)API). It does not apply to the Amazon (HTTP)
API specification (or implementation) itself. Oracle could, for example,
implement their own "Oracle storage bucket Java SDK" with a matching (Java)
API that developers could drop in instead of Amazon's in their Java projects
and wouldn't have to change any code, but that is in no way transferable to
the (HTTP) API (i.e. the one that runs on Amazon's servers).

------
ben509
Whether I like their position or not is irrelevant, whether I like Oracle is
irrelevant, even whether it's what the law says is irrelevant: Oracle's
position and their actions are entirely consistent.

They're copying the S3 API, and they did so under the license granted in the
S3 client software.

If you publish either your client or server software, or some specification of
your API and you do so with some kind of license, you are licensing your API.

Amazon's publishing of their client software under Apache means they have
licensed their API to everyone who downloaded it, including Oracle. The
license is irrevocable.

Google copied Java's API without getting license to do so. Java was not
published by Oracle or Sun with such a license, nor did Google obtain such
license to use their API by contacting Oracle for one.

The I in API means _interface_. Ars is getting confused by the API and the
implementation of it here:

> However, the Amazon SDK is code that uses the S3 API, not code that
> implements it—the difference between a customer who orders hash browns and
> the Waffle House cook who interprets the orders. Code that uses an API will
> be organized completely differently from code that implements one; it may
> not even contain the whole API. And Oracle has for years argued that using
> an API is unrelated to reimplementation and not an infringement of copyright
> (or else every app developer using Java would infringe).

The client library isn't the code using the API, it contains the the API.
Oracle argues in the link:

> This case is about Google’scopying of Oracle’s work. App programmers are
> unaffected. They remain free to write any program they want availing
> themselves of the Java APIs, for free. The decision only requires platform
> developers — usually large corporations with tremendous resources, like
> Google—to take a license if they want to copy Oracle’s work and incorporate
> it into a substitute commercial product.

Oracle's point here is that an application using a small _portion_ of the API
is acceptable copying. AWS published and licensed the _entire_ client
software, containing the _entire_ API for S3.

~~~
gpm
> They're copying the S3 API, and they did so under the license granted in the
> S3 client software.

This is plainly false. To do so under the license they would have had to
comply with the terms of the license, which include attribution. They did not
do so.

~~~
ben509
You're referring to clause 4 in the license[1] which states:

    
    
        4. Redistribution. You may reproduce and distribute copies of the
           Work or Derivative Works thereof in any medium, with or without
           modifications, and in Source or Object form, provided that You
           meet the following conditions:
    

Oracle's server software is not redistributing the API.

[1] [https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-
java-v2/blob/master/LICENSE.t...](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-
java-v2/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

~~~
gpm
Oracle's documentation on the other hand is

[https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/api/](https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/api/)

Not to mention, they _reproduced_ it on the server even if they didn't
distribute it. Copyright protects making copies just as more (more really) as
distributing them.

------
ggm
I didn't see the line in this which said Oracle's API claims vested in Java
bindings which were covered by the apache licence. So, in the whole
'hypocritical' thing, it behoves us to be clear, that product A, not in Apache
licence, and product B, in Apache licence, do not actually inform anything in
a legal claim of API copyright in product A, vs product B

I don't personally think an API should be subject to copyright, I think
copyright and patents in things like this is counter productive. But the law
here isn't in alignment with my personal views, and Oracle's defence does not
vest in some supposed consistency across things they use and things they own:
if they can prove they own a thing which is bound by IPR/Copyright rules, then
thats the law.

'Do not steal my property' is not rebutted by 'but you stole somebody else's
unrelated property in another situation' -If that was the case, an awful lot
of law has to be re-written, its pretty much tit-for-tat law at that point.

Another take would be "even criminals have civil rights"

~~~
jayd16
This misrepresents the situation as the client SDK is not what is being
copied. In fact, you can use the same Amazon client SDK to hit the Oracle
backend api, which Oracle did copy from S3's backend.

~~~
ggm
Sorry, but aren't you making my point for me? people are diving into
'hypocrite' arguments, comparing apples and lobster.

In what way do I mis-represent the situation? Oracle is suing Google for
copying an API. _People are saying_ "but Oracle copied the Amazon API" -I'm
trying to say "yea.. nah: not relevant"

~~~
jayd16
You're misrepresenting what was copied. The SDK is not what was copied so
bringing up the details of the Apache license is what is not relevant.

~~~
ggm
From the Ars Technica Article:

 _Did Oracle infringe Amazon 's copyright here? Ars Technica contacted Oracle
to ask them if they had a license to copy Amazon's S3 API. An Oracle
spokeswoman said that the S3 API was licensed under an Apache 2.0 license. She
pointed us to the Amazon SDK for Java, which does indeed come with an Apache
2.0 license._

I only brought up the Apache licence, because the article we are talking
about, brings up the Apache licence.

