
Stakes Are High in Oracle v. Google, But the Public Has Already Lost - panarky
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/stakes-are-high-oracle-v-google-public-has-already-lost-big
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raverbashing
Anyone who uses or is considering to use an Oracle product should pay
attention to their litigation history

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throwawaykf05
This raises an interesting question: Oracle licensing horror stories apart,
how many times has Oracle actually sued a customer?

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dminor
Ask the state of Oregon

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snarfy
Oracle employees are only shooting themselves in the foot by continuing to
work for them. Guys, it's a nice, healthy job market out there. Please
consider.

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ArchD
Can one write and have the court enforce a free software licence that
discriminates against companies that impose API copyright on others like what
Oracle is doing?

Something along the lines of:

You can use this software, freely distribute it yada yada as long as you do
not "pull an Oracle".

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danielbarla
I'm sure you could (though it would have to be tested in court), but I'm
missing the point slightly because Oracle (/Sun) is the original creator of
Java, so they would not be building it on top of your license (nor would any
other "Oracle" with similar intentions).

If this style of licensing became so ubiquitous that essentially everyone in
the future demanded it, then I guess it could make sense.

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wolf550e
Imagine all GPL software required the licensee to never enforce API copyright,
and if they ever enforced API copyright (over unrelated code), their license
to the GPL code was null and void. Then Oracle can't run Linux.

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Mayzie
What I don't understand, is why other big tech organisations don't join Google
on this (like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Red Hat, IBM, Intel, etc)? The
result will obviously affect them, whether it is now or in the long run.

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coldpie
Microsoft actually argued in favor of Oracle.

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88e282102ae2e5b
Let's say Google loses this case. What are the implications for my free, open
source software? And my closed source commercial software?

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sangnoir
> What are the implications for my free, open source software? And my closed
> source commercial software?

Software that implements other party's APIs might be obligated to agree to a
licensing agreement - projects like Wine, Samba and various 3rd-party
emulators. Ironically, Microsoft's discontinued, Android-compatible project
Astoria would be exposed (to both Google _and_ Oracle) - Microsoft submitted
an amicus in the first Oracle v Google case supporting Oracle's cause. I am
not sure if Xamarin- and Cordova-/Phonegap-type projects would be subject to
Apple's lawsuits.

I also suspect web-APIs might also become risky, making it possibly for Amazon
to sue you for providing AWS-compatible APIs[1] for example

Disclamer: I am not a lawyer, this is just my layman's perspective.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_\(software\))

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coldpie
> Software that implements other party's APIs might be obligated to agree to a
> licensing agreement - projects like Wine, Samba and various 3rd-party
> emulators.

It's far, far larger than that. Netscape implemented the Blink tag first and
other browsers followed suit. Now Netscape (or whoever owns that copyright)
can sue all browsers that implement the Blink tag.

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throwaway2048
The court that decided that APIs were copy-writable was a federal patent
circuit, their decision is not binding as precedent.

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Oletros
Is it binding in that circuit?

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exabrial
Which is a good point, that's a major circuit for tech.

Also, what happens if another circuit rules the opposite? Can we start a case
in a circuit without incompetent judges?

Furthermore, if these judges are elected, they need to be VOTED OUT

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the_ancient
The problem is the First Circuit gets ALL patent cases nationwide, so with
this precedent in place anyone wanting to claim copyright infringement on a
API will toss in a Patent claim as well to ensure it goes only to the First
Circuit

With the high court refusing to address the issue, we will never see another
court get one of these cases.

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Oletros
Yap, this is what I thought. The easy way to go to that court is tossing a
patent claim

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keht
erm...this is confusing...what is the EFF saying here?

It appears they don't want Google to use the fair use argument. Okay. But what
else are they recommending?

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coffeeaddicted
That the last decision that API's are copyrighted is already the problem.
Google - or anyone else - shouldn't have to need to use the fair use argument
for this. This is already a law suit which shouldn't be necessary.

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mikekchar
This idea that APIs are copyrighted in the US is a bigger problem beyond its
borders. I don't know how familiar Americans are about how aggressively the US
pushes its own legal interpretations of copyright law into other countries,
but it is a continuing hassle.

The main problem here is that many countries _do not have fair use_! So if the
legal interpretation that APIs are copyrighted spreads, it doesn't matter if
it is fair use in the US. Even if countries specifically enact laws to exclude
APIs from copyright law, you can bet that there will be huge pressure from the
US to include it.

The Java trap after all -- only worse. We can't even reimplement it. We can't
even implement to specs unless there is a license agreement (and we thought
that patents were bad...)! I hate to be Chicken Little, but the sky does seem
to be moving ominously quickly in the downward direction.

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woliveirajr
In some countries, like Brazil, softwares are not copyrighted, nor ideas. They
are considered as "art", like a book, so you can't copy, use, etc., without
authorization. But you can get the idea and rewrite it. You can't use the same
buttons from some Microsoft product, but nothing stops you from deciding that
a disk symbol means "save".

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chc
That sounds like copyright.

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puppetmaster3
It's simple, as a professional developer (that gets paid, more is better) I
want companies to get paid for software and well.

When they don't, I'm not happy, so I hope Oracle wins. But Google will win,
not because they are right. Oracle's lawyers are idiots as they can't show
it's same. For example run apache http client jar on android and java. It's
same. Idiots.

And would you want Google to violate GPL?

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Jtsummers
It's my understanding that the problem is not with source theft/copying in
violation of licensing. It's with cloning an API.

If Oracle (or anyone) can copyright an API then we might as well pack up and
go home. By that measure, you make a new JavaScript library for LeftPad and
copyright the _API_ along with the source. Now people start using your
library. But it's inefficient. So I come along and clone it, make it faster,
better, stronger, the $6 million LeftPad-compatible clone. You can sue me for
violating your API copyright.

Welcome to the end.

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throwawaykf05
That is what Chicken Little would like you to believe, but you always have the
option of devising your own API, call it prefixWithChars. If your
implementation really is that much better, people will go through the effort
of migrating their software.

The sky is not falling.

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Jtsummers
But it's not a compatible _API_. At that point, I have a second library and
everyone has to rewrite their code to use it. This defeats one of the main
benefits of having libraries in the first place.

The benefit of a library, fundamentally, is that any library with a compatible
interface (described by the API) can be dropped in and used in place of
another library without modification to the calling code. Cloning
functionality is not the same thing if we have to put a prefix:
thrawaykf05s_leftPad or Jtsummers_leftPad in front of everything.

In theory, as a developer using dynamically linked libraries, I can drop in
_any_ version of a library without recompiling. As a user that means you can
drop in AMD's OpenGL implementation or a GPL implementation or Nvidia's and
see no difference in how you launch your program (though you'd see a
difference in performance and perhaps behavior).

(OpenGL isn't a great example because the consortium running it won't do this,
but it is a great example because there are many implementations.)

Now, as a developer you have to develop 100 code paths to handle each
potential OpenGL implementation. Or maybe some nice person does that for you
with a wrapper library. But now that wrapper library API is _also_ copyrighted
and it's out of date. So _another_ API comes into existence that wraps it
_AND_ adds new APIs to its backend. That'd be really fucking stupid.

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throwawaykf05
As a consumer of APIs I agree that having drop-in replacements for APIs is the
ideal state. However, as a producer of APIs, I also appreciate the efforts
required to design a good API. There's some value in that. This translates to
any product other than an API, of course, but in general if somebody creates
something of value, I believe people who derive value from it should respect
the creators' wishes.

This case is not, of course, about APIs. It's because Sun created this
enormously valuable Java developer base, and Google totally free-loaded on
that to bootstrap Android. The API just happens to be the means, and hence the
crux of the lawsuit.

