
Insanity Wins as Appeals Court Overturns Google's Fair Use Victory for Java APIs - cgtyoder
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180327/10431439512/insanity-wins-as-appeals-court-overturns-googles-fair-use-victory-java-apis.shtml
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rococode
Holy moly, is this still the case about like a 10 line chunk of code? And it's
still going on? I can't believe Oracle hasn't gotten more bad press for this.
What an obvious moneygrab attempt... Hopefully this will be overturned again
by someone with a bit more brains as it has terrible implications for other
work done in the past couple of decades.

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shakna
> Holy moly, is this still the case about like a 10 line chunk of code?

62 class headers. Because Android and Java have a compatible API.

In the progress of this ridiculous case, APIs have been found to be non-
copywritable, up until the CAFC got involved. Judges with expert testimony,
and expert experience have repeatedly said they are not able to be copywrited.
On all four fair-use factors.

CAFC then gets the case and removes jury testimony, and overturns previous
decisions through things such as saying Android is opensource, it is
commercial in the same manner that Napster was.

Despite Android's API have different subclasses, methods, and body, the CAFC
did not believe that they altered the "expressive content" of Java's API.

Whoever ran this trial doesn't seem to grasp the bare basics of code.

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shakna
Reading through why CAFC suddenly decided a differing implementation wasn't
transformative, ignoring several juries and judges, makes me think that CAFC
would rule that clang's pragmas that are compatible with GCC must also be a
copyright violation.

The court's definition _makes no sense_.

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dgreensp
Wow, enough mockery and name-calling?

I am actually with Oracle on this whole thing. Calling Android “fair use” is
the insane argument, as legal experts have said. Fair use is a narrow
exemption, not meant to apply to huge corporations and commercial products.
Android is a commercial product; Google even tried to argue that! Google is
not akin to a library performing a public service by making Android. Android
is not Java “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple
copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” (The fact that senior
people at Google seem to honestly believe that Android would have to at least
be a little more of a profit center to be impeachable on copyright grounds is
straight out of an HBO script.)

Google’s own engineers didn’t think it would be legal to copy Java and “scrub
the J word” (actual quote) without licensing from Oracle. The emails are
damning. They knew it wouldn’t be a “clean-room reimplementation” of the APIs,
and it wasn’t. Also, the Java “API” includes the entire behavior of the
standard library. Whether or not APIs are copyrightable (a gray area to be
sure), I think it’s misleading to compare the Java APIs to other examples of
“interfaces.” In any case, Oracle showed that portions of code were either
copy-pasted or heavily “recollected,” so I say they did their job showing they
have a real case. They don’t deserve to be mocked.

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shakna
> Calling Android “fair use” is the insane argument, as legal experts have
> said.

Every step of this case, until CAFC, showed the _opposite_ of that, that
Android met all four requirements, which is more than enough. That would seem
far from insane.

> In any case, Oracle showed that portions of code were either copy-pasted or
> heavily “recollected,” so I say they did their job showing they have a real
> case.

They didn't. They showed only that the _definitions_ were the same. Not the
methods, subclasses, nor body. Only the API.

