[HN Gopher] Google's Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a dis...
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Google's Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for
Google
Author : randtrain34
Score : 281 points
Date : 2020-10-08 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,Google's Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for
| Google''
|
| I don't see how losing even a few billion dollars could be a
| disaster for Google at this point. They control most of the smart
| phones in the world, and that's worth much more than that amount
| of money (regardless of whether using Java was the right choice
| or not).
| bradfitz wrote:
| Few billion dollars, sure. Except that little Supreme Court
| decision on API copyrightability thing.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Why would that be so bad for Google? Can you please explain?
| ffpip wrote:
| Read the article.
|
| The case was bad for Google because their lawyer was bad.
|
| The case would be bad for software everywhere, because API
| copyright. (in future)
|
| You're mixing both and asking why it would be bad for
| Google
| stickfigure wrote:
| It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to figure out who can
| claim copyright to SQL, Posix, C, various assembly languages,
| HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP... pretty much everything. Are copyright
| trolls buying this stuff up yet? Seems like a whole new asset
| class is about to be invented.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| The linked Ars article is excellent, and it's a reminder of how
| much better Timothy Lee is at covering these issues than the
| people who cover them for major newspapers. For example, compare
| his article to the Times article on the same case:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/us/supreme-court-google-o....
|
| It's not enough to say that Lee is writing for a specialized
| audience while the Times caters to a more general audience. Even
| after accounting for that, Lee's coverage of the case is
| superior.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Worth noting Lee wrote for WashPo. As did Krebs.
|
| I suspect this has less to do with reporters than editors.
| ColanR wrote:
| I wonder if Oracle winning would reinvigorate software
| developement - by which I mean, maybe the resulting fragmentation
| would leave a lot of room for new ideas to be developed.
|
| e.g.: if this court case was decided before Google made Android,
| then Google would have had to use something other than Java to do
| it and they wouldn't have been able to attract such a large
| developer base to make apps. Maybe they would have come up with a
| new language, or reused whatever else was viable at the time.
| But, maybe their OS wouldn't have been so overwhelming in its
| popularity and other OSes, like PalmOS and the windows phone OS,
| could have remained alive today. I think there's a lot of people,
| maybe the majority, who would agree that Android's UI was
| inferior to one or both of those alternatives.
|
| e.g. #2: looking to the future, the resulting fragmentation could
| mean that even new OSes will have to be developed (edit - since
| even kernel APIs could be covered by copyright). That could be
| pretty bad for open source and hacking in general - except that
| as another poster has pointed out, closed-down software might
| turn out to be pretty useless compared to open-source. Maybe
| Oracle winning could be a really good thing for reinvigorating
| the development of new paradigms in software.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Fragmentation is almost never a good thing and it's certainly
| not a good thing in this case. Allowing developers to use the
| same knowledge, the same interfaces, the se languages across
| systems means that consumers benefit. Having a de facto
| standard is good for everyone, and arguing that there is less
| innovation in programming because you don't own the rights to
| function names is ridiculous.
| ColanR wrote:
| Seems like it could be compared to breaking up a monopoly.
| When there's one player in town (Java & Android in the two
| examples I used), any competing ideas never get a chance to
| succeed: we're still using variations of Java, probably at
| this point for historical reasons, and Purism etc. is having
| a real rough go of it. Look at the failed attempts at
| competing OSes that various phone manufacturers put out.
| There were some duds, but I mentioned two that could have
| given Andriod a run for its money if there were more
| fragmentation in the market - and I think that would have
| been better for consumers.
|
| > arguing that there is less innovation in programming
| because you don't own the rights to function names is
| ridiculous
|
| I applaud the rhetorical flourish, but I think it misses the
| point. It's not the cause of the fragmentation, but the
| fragmentation caused by the lost rights that improves the
| innovation.
| stickfigure wrote:
| ...or it could mean that we'd all still be writing COBOL on
| OS/360.
|
| It's a terrible idea.
| gumby wrote:
| Why is this being pitched (in all the press I have seen) as a
| "google vs Oracle" fight? This is a direct attack on software
| development by Oracle, who will also suffer if they prevail in
| the courts.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| A. That is the actual name of the case.
|
| B. "Faceoff", "versus", and " debate" pander to the competitive
| culture of American business and politics.
| flowerlad wrote:
| This isn't just a disaster for Google. This is a disaster for
| competition in the tech industry and a disaster for consumers. If
| APIs can be copyrighted, what's next? File formats? On-the-wire
| protocols?
| bismuthsalt wrote:
| The unimpeachable approach for the software industry is to
| setup consortiums to define open standards for APIs, file
| formats and wire protocols, instead of relying on replicating
| the most popular proprietary ones. In fact there already exist
| such consortiums, for example https://www.w3.org, tasked with
| standardizing WWW, or https://www.cncf.io for cloud computing
| standards.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Why not screw heads and threads, too?
|
| Apple wouldn't have to just use hard-to-find screwdrivers, they
| could just make a new screw shape, copyright the design, and
| then it'll be even harder to open their gadgets.
| rdsnsca wrote:
| Actually screw heads are copyrighted, see :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson
| sterwill wrote:
| Copyrights are not patents, and your link asserts that the
| Robertson screw design is patented, not copyrighted. The
| Google vs. Oracle case is about copyrights.
| dmoy wrote:
| A relevant point here that patents expire in ~decade or
| two, whereas copyright expires when Disney tells you it
| can expire (which is never).
|
| Not that expiring in a decade or two would help in the
| area of tech where stuff moves so fast.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| It helps. Didn't MP3 patents expire recently? MP3 is far
| from obsolete.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Your thing of the MP4 patents.
| monocasa wrote:
| It was 2017 that the last MP3 patents expired, which is
| pretty recent, IMO. It was patented on the encode side
| about 10 years longer than on the decode side.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Yeah, I remember having to use nonfree repos to enable
| MP3 playback on my Linux machine back in the day. I could
| not remember when it stopped being the case, but 2017
| seems about right.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Right. Google's lawyer brought up the distinction at
| least a couple times, saying that the novelty of the API
| might be patentable but not copyrightable.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| If that happens the bits will be on alibaba before the
| product is shipped to media.
| pvelagal wrote:
| Google should have bought Sun.
| elygre wrote:
| Imagine where we'd been if Google just paid Sun a couple hundred
| million dollars, and then put it's weight behind Java...
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| stack wise but heap foolish
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| That would be awesome, a world where Java was discarded.
| flomo wrote:
| Essentially the core issue here.
| josefx wrote:
| Google spend a lot of money on not doing that, while Sun was
| already working on the completely free OpenJDK.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > This is a widespread practice in the software industry. Oracle,
| for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who
| built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to
| Oracle's rival cloud platform.
|
| Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 1. That would probably be considered fair use.
|
| 2. The amount of money Oracle would get back (and going
| forwards) in licensing fees for Android would probably dwarf
| most financial prospects from any API reimplementations that
| might be at risk.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That would probably be considered fair use.
|
| Because APIs have never before been considered copyrightable,
| unless Google _wins_ on fair use in this case, we will have
| exactly _zero_ on-point case law as to when an API
| reimplementation is fair use.
|
| Speculating on what would be considered fair use in API re-
| implementations in that case would be _extremely_
| speculative.
|
| > The amount of money Oracle would get back (and going
| forwards) in licensing fees for Android would probably dwarf
| most financial prospects from any API reimplementations that
| might be at risk.
|
| Maybe more than existing ones, but is it worth more than the
| entire strategy of using API reimplementation to stay in the
| game against Amazon, who is far and away ahead in cloud? Is
| losing that worth a parasitic claim on Android until Google
| replaces it with something not subject to that claim?
| ihatethissite wrote:
| How do you figure that it would be considered fair use in one
| case but not the other?
| gwd wrote:
| > That would probably be considered fair use.
|
| Why would that be considered fair use, and Google's not be?
| As far as I can tell it's exactly the same situation.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Because Oracle implemented the S3 API in order to be
| compatible with Amazon, while Google didn't implement the
| Java API in order for Android apps to be compatible with
| server-side Java code.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Both reimplement for compatibility at some level in the
| toolchain, why fair use analysis would privilege one
| level of interoperability over another is purely
| speculative; arguably, the kind of user-interoperability
| Oracle does is _more_ of an assault on the market for
| what is reimplemented (that 's the _whole purpose_ of
| Oracle doing it) than what Google is doing, and that 's a
| factor that weighs _against_ fair use.
|
| It is important to realize that _since_ APIs have never
| been viewed as copyrightable previously, we also, if
| Google loses on both copyrightability and fair use, will
| have _zero_ case law that is directly on point for any
| API reimplementation being fair use. Speculating on the
| law that will develop in that area is fun, but almost by
| definition not strongly grounded.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Google wasn't interested in interoperability. A big part of
| why they allegedly walked away from Java licensing was
| Oracle wanted Android to actually run Java apps, and Google
| wanted to basically fork off, but just benefit from the
| developer community around the Java language.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Can't you use many Java libraries on Android?
| Interoperable doesn't mean "exactly the same".
| sangnoir wrote:
| Interoperability is not limited to executable-interop: it
| includes developer knowledge, libraries and tooling -
| which are exactly the reasons Google chose to use Java
| (the language). Dalvik checked all those boxes, without
| being bytecode-compatible with the JVM
| megous wrote:
| It's not like all hinges on oral arguments. Lots of organizations
| informed the court in this case, about the issues at hand:
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...
| Aqueous wrote:
| This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a
| disaster for software everywhere. If APIs become copyrightable,
| what happens to any open source software the implements a
| proprietary API?
|
| Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework to
| properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be possible
| to teach them the difference between interface and implementation
| within the parameters of these arguments. And beyond that the
| conservative majority is predisposed to treat everything as
| property. This is not going to end well.
| guram11 wrote:
| > This is not going to end well
|
| relax, its 2020 so now lets just enjoy how "crazy" this whole
| thing can go to and finally if Oracle wins... we RIOT, won't
| end well alright
| miohtama wrote:
| > This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a
| disaster for software everywhere.
|
| Not in the EU where there is precedence with SAP/R3 saying APIs
| are not copyrightable.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If you can't sell your products in the US, I think you're
| going to have a problem.
| afwe wrote:
| The tech world is in the US, not the EU.
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| Well the tech world in the US is about to end by all
| measures.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| APIs being copyrightable doesn't actually harm implementations
| of APIs that fall under fair use. (Fair use exemptions
| specifically apply to copyrighted things.) Interoperability is
| fair use. And things like something being non-commercial, such
| as a lot of open source software, is a major factor in
| determining whether or not usage is fair. Things like WINE or
| NES emulators or the like would fall very comfortably into fair
| use.
|
| It's nowhere near as world-ending as Google's public policy
| team would like you to believe. But given that Android is _not_
| fair use (it 's not interoperable, they just wanted to glom on
| the popularity of the platform), it sucks for Google.
| binarybits wrote:
| Sorry, but this is not an accurate summary of the state of
| the law. Whether Android's implementation of Java was fair
| use is one of the questions the Supreme Court is considering.
| Google was absolutely trying to achieve interoperability with
| Java, so if Google loses it would make it more difficult for
| others to claim fair use. Fair use is complicated so others
| might succeed where Google failed, but a loss for Google
| would be bad news for interoperability generally.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Google was absolutely trying to achieve interoperability
| with Java
|
| I don't think this is such an easy argument. Google's
| interest was ultimately the bottom line.
|
| Without discussing the copyrightability, from a strictly
| monetary perspective, APIs are product that, in this case,
| has a very high monetary value (market share == $$$), and
| Google chose it for this very specific reason (developers
| == market share == $$$). Again, I don't imply that
| copyrightability is good or bad, but the entire matter has
| been about money, and strictly from that perspective,
| ownership has a sense.
| nradov wrote:
| I don't believe that Google was really trying to achieve
| interoperability. If it was then they would have passed the
| Java Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) tests. Other
| companies did that and are legally in the clear for their
| Java implementations. Why didn't Google?
| ghaff wrote:
| Because they were too arrogant to do so? Note that
| Microsoft was eventually forced to make peace with Sun
| over Java after a long lawsuit.
| nradov wrote:
| I'm not privy to Google's management thinking but I
| suspect they made that decision to save time and hit a
| market window. Android originally used the open source
| Apache Harmony Java implementation which didn't comply
| with the Sun (Oracle) Java license for the TCK. If Google
| had dropped Harmony they would have had to either write
| their own Java implementation from scratch or license one
| from another vendor like IBM. They had plenty of
| resources to pursue those other options but either one
| would have take more time and allowed Apple to build a
| lead in the smartphone market. So Google stuck with
| Harmony and now they're facing the legal consequences.
| curt15 wrote:
| >Interoperability is fair use.
|
| That seems incompatible with the text of Section 107, which
| includes the amount copied as a factor for determining fair
| use. The more compatible your implementation is, the more you
| have to copy, so the logical end of this reasoning is that
| Android's implementation of Java would be fair use if it had
| copied _all_ of the API, not just a subset.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Which it did under open license starting from OpenJDK 9.
| Oracle argues probably this has given Google an advantage,
| which is, in technical terms, bollocks, as Oracle was not
| making an operating system.
| orangecat wrote:
| _Things like WINE or NES emulators or the like would fall
| very comfortably into fair use._
|
| That is not at all clear.
|
| _But given that Android is not fair use (it 's not
| interoperable_
|
| How is it not? Lots of code written for the JVM will build
| and run unmodified on Android. Not 100%, but WINE isn't 100%
| compatibile either.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > Interoperability is fair use.
|
| What about improving the API? E.g. some languages may be
| mostly but not 100% compatible with existing languages and
| provide more or less the same API but not be 100% the same -
| both the in the runtime library (API) and the language
| itself.
|
| For example Free Pascal is mostly compatible with Delphi but
| not the same and its runtime library is mostly the same as
| Delphi but also not the same.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Copyright already accounts for "derivatives." The GPL uses
| this to prevent proprietary forks for example.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >And things like something being non-commercial, such as a
| lot of open source software, is a major factor in determining
| whether or not usage is fair.
|
| Why it should? It would mean that implementing commercial
| Java runtime without Oracle license is not possible?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Whether usage is commercial or not is a big part of the
| first factor in the fair use test: https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_charac...
|
| You could arguably implement Java without a license from
| Oracle provided you were using the GPL, as OpenJDK is
| released under the JDK, and presumably includes the entire
| Java API. The problem for Google, of course, is OEMs
| would've balked at being forced to open source all of their
| proprietary modifications to Android.
|
| Wikipedia says the OpenJDK was released in 2007, so Google
| could've legally used the Java API under GPL terms, but
| chose not to, and also chose not to pay for Java licensing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You could arguably implement Java without a license
| from Oracle provided you were using the GPL
|
| So, as long as you are using it under the license Oracle
| offers it to you under, you could use it without a
| license from Oracle?
|
| I think that is inherently self-contradictory.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >would've balked at being forced to open source all of
| their proprietary modifications to Android
|
| OpenJDK have linking exception, so it doesn't apply. In
| fact Android uses OpenJDK now. It also makes Oracle case
| looks phoney, suing Google for Java usage while having
| released freely available OpenJDK.
|
| But that's not the point, I think implementing
| API/ABI/protocols/whatever should be allowed whether or
| not vendor wants it. There are many reimplementations of
| competitors APIs, and ruling in favor of Oracle would
| basically break that. Under that interpretation Wine
| would be in danger too, as significant part of Wine
| development is commercial (by CodeWeavers making their
| CrossOver product).
| AstralStorm wrote:
| OpenJDK is not released under GPL, but a much more
| permissive license.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > And things like something being non-commercial, such as
| a lot of open source software, is a major factor in
| determining whether or not usage is fair.
|
| > Why it should?
|
| Because its _explicitly_ a factor, in the statute, for fair
| use analysis.
|
| > It would mean that implementing commercial Java runtime
| without Oracle license is not possible?
|
| Maybe, maybe not. If Google loses on both copyrightability
| and fair use, the _entire_ case law on API fair use will be
| one negative instance. We _might_ also get a more specific
| test articulated in the ruling, but we have no idea what
| that test would be now, so its hard to speculate (well,
| _easy_ to speculate, but hard to judge which speculation is
| more accurate) what the impact would be on any other use.
| interestica wrote:
| > Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual
| framework to properly adjudicate this.
|
| It's why silly (and inadequate) analogies emerge:
|
| "Justice Clarence Thomas compared Google's copying of the Java
| APIs to a football team taking a rival's playbook."
| wang_li wrote:
| On a pure intelligence question the justices are likely top
| 1% or 2% among human populations. They also have disciplined
| minds that allow them to use their intelligence effectively.
|
| It's more likely the arstechniva writer failed to understand
| the point of the analogy.
|
| Having just listen to the audio, it really annoyed me that
| Google's lawyer kept saying "If we can't copy this it would
| be impossible to write software." And always left of the "in
| Java" part. Really fucking misleading.
| fdye wrote:
| What really sucks is this was a perfect time for a lawyer to
| use Justice Thomas' analogy to better explain the difference.
| I would have tried something like:
|
| "Close your honor, but let me expand on this further. Imagine
| instead that your opponent publishes their calls and they are
| regularly available to all individuals of the general public.
| However, while they may describe a call for going long, they
| do not give any specifics if the receiver starts from the
| left, center, right side of the field, how fast he should go,
| who should block for him, etc. They essentially are just
| assigning a call to a general concept of 'go long'. Now as a
| competitor team, I look through their publicly available
| calls and say "Hey, thats a good idea, we should have a call
| for 'go long' as well". However, in practice my team does
| start from the left, and then cut in the center of the field
| to receive the ball. This may, or may not be totally
| different then what my opponents choose to do when they call
| "go long" The additional benefit is if I transfer a new coach
| onto my team, he can use the call "go long" and even though
| the team accomplishes the goal, possibly by a different
| route, he can make the call to accomplish essentially the
| same thing."
|
| Note: Not a huge sports guys, so perhaps my football analogy
| broke down a bit there, but hopefully you get the idea.
| defen wrote:
| If I were Oracle's lawyer, I'd respond by saying that you
| can have the concept of "go long", but you can't literally
| name it "go long" because there was an act of creativity
| involved in mapping that name onto the concept of a
| receiver running far down the field. So you have to call it
| "go deep" or whatever.
| Spivak wrote:
| It's not about the names though. It's that when you look
| at playbooks for both teams you see that the names of all
| the plays are identical, and under the same headings! And
| you come to the conclusion that the second team must have
| copied the names from the first teams playbook.
|
| Such a thing might be considered fair use if the second
| team's argument was they indeed copied the playbook
| because they had a recruited some players from the first
| team and keeping the names the same made it easier for
| them during practice. But for now the judge is suspicious
| that they've come up with this explanation after the
| fact.
| defen wrote:
| Yeah, I don't like it, but given my (probably poor)
| understanding of copyright, I don't see how Oracle is
| wrong here. It would be one thing if we were just talking
| about something like Math.max where there's really only 1
| possible way to declare it; but it's the entirety of the
| API.
| ballenf wrote:
| I think the playbook is just a bad analogy because it
| misses that point of what an interface is. It's the means
| of connecting two dissimilar mechanisms. A translation
| layer.
|
| I'd have argued it's more like copyrighting doorknob
| placement (opposite hinge, at hand height) and operation
| (twisting) on doors vs. patenting a novel mechanism inside
| the doorknob.
|
| A football playbook is more like the blueprints of the
| inside of the doorknob. Of course it's patentable if
| playbooks are patentable (I presume they are if considered
| works of choreography as in a dance).
| jacobr1 wrote:
| But we are talking about copyright, not patents. So to
| stretch your analogy. Imagine I'm a door manufacturer, or
| maybe a manufacturer of tools for construction so that
| professionals can make their own doors. I create some
| kind of stencil that has the doorknob placement cut-out.
| And maybe a few variants with places for windows and
| such. The general idea of such a stencil might be
| patentable, even if the general standard dimensions are
| not. The tool is a unique idea (maybe). But we are
| talking about copywritten material. The specific stencil
| design, that you could photocopy is the thing in
| question.
|
| And that is one of several arguments Oracle made, that
| api interface is a stencil.
|
| I think I would agree the law supports that argument from
| what I know about it, copyright is pretty broad. But at
| the same time, I think that is perverse and we should
| change the law.
| mamon wrote:
| Or compare APIs to the car interface: steering wheel +
| pedals. If one car manufacturer was able to copyright
| them, then what are other manufacturers supposed to do?
| The second one can use joystick for steering, and maybe a
| lever for braking and acceleration. The third one has to
| invent something even weirder.
|
| Everybody loses: manufacturers, because they can't easily
| create competing products, and users, because they have
| to re-learn driving every time they change car brand.
| Shakahs wrote:
| I think the QWERTY analogy quoted in the article is
| perfect. QWERTY is on typewriters, computers, and
| smartphones. Same interface, completely different
| implementations. And this is technology that everyday
| people are familiar with.
| Chris_Newton wrote:
| It has always seemed to me that a good analogy for the
| API situation would be the design of typefaces (as
| distinct from a particular implementation of that design
| through, for example, instructions in a font file), which
| receives special treatment in US law and is not subject
| to copyright in that jurisdiction.
|
| As far as I can see (but please note that I am not even
| in the US, never mind a legal scholar) the relevant US
| law is 37 CFR SS 202.1 about "Material not subject to
| copyright"
| (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1). This
| enumerates several cases that are explicitly excluded
| from copyright protection. One is "typeface as typeface",
| which was apparently interpreted as described above in a
| litigated case (Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer).
|
| An argument has certainly been made, though I can't
| immediately find the original source, that this exclusion
| is justified because of the utilitarian nature of a
| typeface design: allowing one party to control all use of
| it would be against the public interest, because
| ultimately that principle could allow for all printed
| communication to become controlled.
|
| It seems to me that APIs fulfil a similar purpose. They
| are not useful in themselves, lacking a corresponding
| implementation. They are, however, an essential basis for
| standardisation, interoperability and communication
| between practitioners.
|
| Under 202.1(b) of the law cited above, another class of
| works excluded from copyright protection is "Ideas,
| plans, methods, systems, or devices, as distinguished
| from the particular manner in which they are expressed or
| described in a writing". I wonder whether a similar
| argument about the utilitarian nature of APIs as a
| specification distinct from its implementation could be
| made based on that.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> If APIs become copyrightable, what happens to any open
| source software the implements a proprietary API?
|
| That has implications for language implementations too. Who
| would own the standard library for any given language? What
| about programs that call API functions? Are they derivative
| works too?
|
| An API is necessarily functional first and foremost. It would
| cause chaos and some weird dystopian future if Oracle wins.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The standard library is owned by the people creating it, and
| of course your work using the standard library is a derived
| work of that standard library.
|
| For example, glibc is owned by GNU, and it is licensed under
| the LGPL, so you are allowed to dynamically link it without
| having to release your own code under the GPL (or
| compatible). This is all happening today.
|
| The only projects that will be more seriously affected by
| this decision are WINE and similar - projects that are
| copying the API but not the implementation. Even here, it is
| very likely that WINE could win on Fair Use, since their
| copying is obviously done for interoperability.
|
| Also, APIs are obviously creative human works, and their
| purpose is first and foremost usability for the end-user.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| But now if I write my own libc implementation, someone
| (who?) could come after me for violating their copyright on
| the libc api.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > who?
|
| That's an interesting question. Perhaps K&R? Or maybe
| their employer? Or perhaps by now the copyright may be
| with ANSI/ISO?
|
| But this does raise an interesting point, about who would
| own copyright on something that was not believed to be
| copyrightable for much of its history.
| kps wrote:
| The current owner would probably be Micro Focus, from
| acquiring Attachmate from acquiring Novell from acquiring
| Unix System Laboratories from AT&T.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Hot stock tip!
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The C standard library's API would belong to AT&T. Same
| with Unix syscalls. Glibc would be infringing.
| diminish wrote:
| Making a drop-in replacement for interoperability for any
| library or API could fall victim under the current law.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Another interesting take: Machine architectures expose an
| API, and it may become impossible for anyone but a chip
| manufacturer to distribute a compiler.
| rocqua wrote:
| Machine architectures are very much copyrightable right?
| That's why Intel license x86 to AMD.
|
| Thing is, for chip manufactures it makes no sense not to
| allow others to call this x86 API. Things could get dicier
| for other who try and virtualize a machine instruction set.
| bismuthsalt wrote:
| ARM has built a business around selling licenses for an
| instruction set, with multiple third parties implementing
| said instruction set in silicon.
| ColanR wrote:
| That sounds like a win for RISC.
| josefx wrote:
| > Who would own the standard library for any given language?
|
| Require copyright assignment or a guarantee for royalty free
| use by any implementation. Standards committees already have
| to deal with hidden patent dependencies someone might sneak
| in so this would just be another bullet point on paperwork
| that should already exist.
| pfortuny wrote:
| It is usually in the interest of the designer of the API to
| have as many users as possible.
|
| BUT in this case we are talking not of using part of an API
| (say the Math library to implement a physics engine is
| assembly and link it) but of reimplementing a whole language
| which has, as of today an when the events discussed took
| place (even if we agree to hate it) an owner.
| simonh wrote:
| >It is usually in the interest of the designer of the API
| to have as many users as possible.
|
| When they first design and publish it yes, but Oracle
| didn't design and publish the Java APIs, they bought them
| after they had becomes very popular and widely used.
|
| At that point they don't need to care about making it
| popular, it already is, all they care about is milking that
| existing ecosystem for every penny they can get. If future
| API publishers care about this they can just license out
| their API spec, but right now Oracle just wants to be able
| to squeeze whoever they can until the pips squeak.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I know, I know. But if the argument is abstract then we
| have to keep it so.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| In a market-consolidating world this argument rapidly
| loses persuasive power.
| burtonator wrote:
| So if Oracle implements a proprietary API in GPL software does
| that mean that all Oracle software is copyleft?
| thechao wrote:
| This is a great question. In the last ten years of this
| shenanigans I've not seen it asked. As an owner of GPL'd
| APIs, it's food-for-thought.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So if Oracle implements a proprietary API in GPL software
| does that mean that all Oracle software is copyleft?
|
| No, not at all.
|
| OTOH, it does mean if they implement a GPL interface in
| proprietary software it _does_ mean that they are in
| violation of copyright (barring a fair use defense) and the
| GPL, potentially triggering the loss-of-license provisions of
| the GPL and other legal consequences.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Little note: what you're really asking is whether the authors
| of GPL software would have grounds to sue Oracle for
| copyright infringement.
|
| As another HN commenter put it to me when I made the same
| mistake: "The GPL is not viral." If one party breaks the
| terms of the license, then normal copyright goes into effect.
| cma wrote:
| Oracle will no longer be able to use an SQL based language as
| IBM will have ownership of the API.
| bigbubba wrote:
| I wish I could believe this is how it would actually play
| out in reality.
| nradov wrote:
| That's not really the court's responsibility. There is no legal
| definition of "interface" or "implementation". They're just
| trying to interpret a gray area in the law and it could come
| down either way.
|
| Any real solution will have to be legislated.
| cabaalis wrote:
| A certification group that allows a good marketing point
| could also achieve. Just making up a name, "Our APIs are
| certified by Open API Association" might encourage developers
| to develop with A given company's API.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > That's not really the court's responsibility.
|
| Yes, it is.
|
| > There is no legal definition of "interface" or
| "implementation".
|
| There is a legal definition of what is included, and what is
| excluded, from copyrightability, and (though its quite fuzzy,
| in large part because it was trying to incorporate a fuzzy
| judicial doctrine grounded in the First Amendment into the
| statute) what is included, and excluded, from "fair use" even
| if it otherwise violated copyright.
|
| The courts job is very much to test existing concrete things
| against those definitions.
| rlewkov wrote:
| "Any real solution will have to be legislated. " So true.
| Congress can amend the particular section of the code to
| explicitly exclude APIs from being copyrightable ... if they
| want to.
| empthought wrote:
| Yes, this is, has always been, and always will be the case.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| I thought Congress only existed to appoint judges.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Or approve executive appointees to create administrative
| law ...
| [deleted]
| rayiner wrote:
| Read Sotomayor's and Kagan's questions at 20-22, 52-58:
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...
|
| I think the Justices were struggling a bit for analogies, but
| got the basic gist of the difference between implementing code
| and declarations.
|
| The difficulty is that they have to think about this in terms
| of the relevant legal concept (merger) not the relevant
| technical concept (interoperability). You can copyright
| expressions of ideas, but not ideas themselves. Merger doctrine
| says you can't copyright an expression of an idea if there is
| only one way to express the idea, because then the idea
| "merged" into the expression.
|
| Do declarations merge into the idea of the implantation? In
| some sense clearly they don't. If you have a set of functions
| that operate on an object, the convention in C is to put the
| object first and the parameters after. You "append, into this
| vector, this value." In Common Lisp, it's often reversed. You
| "append this value to this vector." Both express the same idea
| --a command for appending a value to a vector--but there is a
| creative choice in the expression.
|
| But you can think of the same idea at a lower level. "Calling a
| function named push to append an element to a vector where the
| first parameter is the vector and the second parameter is the
| element." In that case, there is really one way to express that
| idea. Why would you think of the "idea" at such a low level?
| Because that's what you're doing when you're interfacing with
| an actual API. The "idea" isn't some abstract hypothetical
| function for appending, it's the actual "push" function with
| parameters in the specific order.
|
| The problem is that interoperability is not really something
| that goes to copyright-ability, but fair use, which comes after
| copyrightability. Dictating how you see the "idea" based on
| interoperability seems a bit like a phase ordering violation.
| protomyth wrote:
| _Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework
| to properly adjudicate this._
|
| Justice Breyer's QWERTY analogy was pretty good.
|
| Also, Google's lawyer is supposed to supply that framework in
| oral and the brief.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| If APIs become copyrightable, we just have to change our
| strategy a little bit. Instead of making a compatible API, you
| write a program to modify other programs, which detects calls
| to the target API and transforms them to a shim that is not
| copyrighted, which can call either the copyrighted API or your
| new API.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I don't think that would work as it could be construed as a
| derivative work
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Doubt it. But since I don't have millions of dollars or a
| need to litigate this in court at the moment, neither of us
| will know any time soon.
| rektide wrote:
| > This might not just be a disaster for Google - it could be a
| disaster for software everywhere.
|
| This case has been a ticking time bomb, where the law is to
| decide whether ideas are patentable. Extremely scary news,
| seeing it go badly.
| beerandt wrote:
| >>"that the conservative majority is predisposed to treat
| everything as property..."
|
| This is misleading at best.
|
| For example: RBG, despite her left-leaning reputation, was
| easily one of, if not _the_ , most pro-copyright and pro-IP
| justices on the bench. (Relatedly, she also was pretty pro big
| business, which rarely fits the portrayed narrative.)
|
| Not all areas of law, especially at the Supreme Court level,
| easily translate into right/left politics.
|
| https://www.law360.com/articles/1312244/ginsburg-remembered-...
|
| https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/09/23/justice...
| x3ro wrote:
| This is a strawman. The argument wasn't that no left-leaning
| people would treat things as property, but that most
| conservatives would. As such, you're not attacking the actual
| argument with your point.
| pc86 wrote:
| It's not a strawman at all, as the original statement is
| clearly setting up the flip side of that argument - that
| left-leaning justices are less likely to do so.
| Talanes wrote:
| Well, even then, showing one left-leaning justice with
| pro-property stances doesn't actually disprove that
| argument. Less likely things still happen some of the
| time.
| grasshopperpurp wrote:
| I'm no expert on RBG, but I always pegged her as a Neo-Lib,
| rather than a Leftist.
| cultus wrote:
| This is really an important distinction. Social issues like
| gay marriage and things like this are completely
| orthogonal. The Democratic Party as a whole is very much
| neoliberal or liberal as opposed to left. Liberal judges
| are much the same.
| neves wrote:
| The Democratic Party would be considered center-right in
| any other country of the world, but the USA.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Democratic Party would be considered center-right
| in any other country of the world, but the USA.
|
| Any other Western democracy (including some Western-model
| democracies outside of the West proper), sure. But then
| the left-right axis is not really readily transferrable
| to outside of that domain, anyway.
| drstewart wrote:
| The DNC would be center right in Saudi Arabia? By what
| metric?
|
| What is with the ridiculous hyperbole that's so common
| when talking about America on the internet, especially by
| non-Americans? Talk about "American exceptionalism" -
| just in a different way.
| typon wrote:
| I think OP implied "any democratic western nation".
| tathougies wrote:
| Ah right, the soft ethno-nationalism of implying that the
| only 'real countries' are the western democratic ones....
| great...
| tathougies wrote:
| Indeed it's quite ridiculous. What they mean to say is
| that the DNC would be center-right in Europe, which is an
| incredibly Euro-centric way to look at the world. In
| reality, if you consider the actual bulk of the planet,
| which would include mainly China and India, the DNC and
| RNC dichotomy is rather unclassifiable.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| If the House of Saud tried to impose Obamacare there
| would be a revolt.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Well, what's going on in America is being pushed down the
| throats of everyone in the world. You can hardly read an
| article without someone mentioning Trump and US politics
| in general. We may as well join in too!
| rayiner wrote:
| It depends on how you define things. For example, do you
| measure by where Democrats end up in practice, or where
| they want to go? For example, the United States is to the
| right of Germany in terms of universal healthcare. But
| Medicare 4 All, where many Democrats appear to want to go
| in the long term--though they disagree about how quickly
| they want to get there--would be quite to the left
| compared to the multi-payor mandatory insurance system
| currently in place in Germany.
|
| It also varies quite a bit by subject-area. In Germany,
| the constitutional court held (around the same time as
| Roe) that legalized abortion was unconstitutional,
| violating the fetus's right to life. Today, it is
| technically still illegal, but decriminalized up to 12
| weeks. (Shorter than in almost every state in the U.S.)
| The abortion rate in Germany is much lower. The
| Democratic party's views on abortion would not be
| considered center-right in Germany. On gay rights,
| Germany got legalized same-sex marriage a couple of years
| after the U.S. And things like surrogacy, which gay male
| couples often rely on to have kids, is illegal.
|
| Or, consider that Merkel, a member of the center-right
| Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has called for a ban on
| burqa. To my knowledge, even Trump has not said anything
| like that. Similarly, on immigration, while Merkel
| allowed Muslim refugees, her successor declared that a
| "mistake" which the country had "learned from."
| Democratic favorability to refugees would not be a
| center-right position in Germany.
|
| In the area of religion, the U.S. is extremely left wing
| compared to every country but France. In the U.S.,
| teaching religion (as such) is banned in public schools.
| In the U.K., Germany, Italy, and Spain (four of the five
| largest EU countries) it's actually required, either by
| statute or by the constitution. Children have a right to
| receive a religious education at the public expense in
| these countries.
|
| In the area of taxes, the Democratic Party is center-
| right in some ways but quite left win in others. Merkel
| has championed Germany following along with Trump's
| corporate tax cuts. The Democrats' proposal to repeal
| that would not be a center-right position in Germany. The
| Democrats' proposal to tax capital gains as ordinary
| income is quite left wing. Most Western European
| countries, including Germany, have preferential treatment
| for capital gains taxes. In general, the U.S. has the
| most progressive tax code in the OECD:
| https://opportunitywa.org/u-s-federal-income-tax-
| structure-m...
|
| But Democrats' tepid support for labor unions, for
| example, would be considered center-right or even right-
| wing in Germany.
|
| On the whole, on social, religious, and immigration
| issues, the current Democratic Party is solidly to the
| left compared to western Europe. On labor issues, it's to
| the right. On corporate and investment taxation, it's
| solidly on the left. On healthcare, its to the right, but
| mainly for reasons that have to do with minimizing
| disruption to peoples' current private insurance. Where
| they want to end up, single payer public insurance, is
| solidly on the left.
|
| Our next Vice President will very likely be a Democrat
| who, in 2019, supported single-payer public healthcare,
| treating capital gains as ordinary income, a 35%
| corporate income tax rate, a financial transactions tax,
| publicly funded abortion with no compromises such as
| waiting periods, Green New Deal, free healthcare for
| people who immigrate illegally, etc. If she actually
| believed those things, she would be a solidly mainstream
| left politician in most European countries.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But Medicare 4 All, where many Democrats appear to want
| to go in the long term--though they disagree about how
| quickly they want to get there
|
| Democrats generally agree that there should be universal
| access to health care, and a mostly agree that that
| should involve a public plan (not just a private subsidy)
| available to at least some section of the population
| beyond the current Medicaid population.
|
| There is not general agreement within the Democratic
| Party on universal single-payer as even a long-term goal.
| The currently dominant neoliberal faction of the
| Democratic Party supports a public _option_ as a long-
| term component of healthcare policy to acheive universal
| access, but does not generally support single-payer as a
| goal, in either the near or long term.
|
| > In general, the U.S. has the most progressive tax code
| in the OECD
|
| As your own source notes, net of transfers and taxes, the
| US has one of the _least_ progressive systems in the
| OECD.
|
| > In the area of taxes, the Democratic Party is center-
| right in some ways but quite left win in others. Merkel
| has championed Germany following along with Trump's
| corporate tax cuts.
|
| You seem to be really obsessed with the CDU as your
| measure of center-right parties, but AFAICT the CDU is to
| the right of most parties labelled center-right, not just
| in Europe, but even _in Germany specifically_ (which has
| a fairly wide range of center-right parties.)
|
| But, yes, its really only the dominant faction of the
| Democratic Party that is center-right, the "progressive"
| faction is center to center-left by European terms, and
| the whole (today, with the gains the progressive wing has
| made over the recent years considered) is probably more
| center than center-right; the "Democrats are a center-
| right" party was most true at the height of the
| Clintonian neoliberalism of the Democratic Party which as
| faded over the last decade or so and particularly since
| Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign reenergized the progressive
| wing, though it has still not become dominant.
| rayiner wrote:
| > There is not general agreement within the Democratic
| Party on universal single-payer as even a long-term goal.
| The currently dominant neoliberal faction of the
| Democratic Party supports a public option as a long-term
| component of healthcare policy to acheive universal
| access, but does not generally support single-payer as a
| goal, in either the near or long term.
|
| A big majority of Democrats support Medicare 4 All:
| https://www.kff.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/01/9394-Figure-3.... They support a
| public option somewhat more, but to me it seems more like
| they do so to soften the transition to a single-payer
| system. A "public option" wouldn't be like the multi-
| payer systems of Germany, Switzerland, or the
| Netherlands. Since it would kill private competitors in
| the long run, it's just a slower road to single payer.
|
| Regarding taxes: netting transfers mixes up the tax
| system from the welfare system. As the article points
| out, our taxation is progressive but our spending is
| regressive. It's a system designed to redistribute money
| from the rich to the middle class, not the middle class
| to the poor.
|
| As to Germany, I use that as an example because it's a
| large European country and I'm familiar with it. CDU has
| been moving left for the last 15 years:
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/08/hazar....
|
| Like the above, various international party comparisons
| show Democrats moving left of center by 2012:
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/08/hazar...
|
| As to social or religious issues, Italy or Spain would be
| more conservative in some respects. (Islam isn't a
| recognized religion in Italy.)
|
| The recent rise of progressives has moved Democrats
| sharply left in part because Europe has been moving to
| the right economically for decades. Low corporate and
| investment taxes and deregulation is gospel across the
| European center, but it's disappeared among progressive
| Democrats. That wasn't remarkable in 1975 but it's
| remarkable today. Macron, for example, is campaigning on
| deregulation and a government takeover of Islam, and his
| major competition is to his right. Center left parties in
| France aren't questioning the country's fairly low
| corporate and investment taxes. Neither are those in
| Spain. Democrats (in particular Warren's utterly
| cockamamie proposal) really stand out in that area as a
| throwback.
|
| I mean that's before you get started on Sweden's center-
| left party continuing to cut corporate taxes and
| partially privatizing social security.
|
| Oh, I forgot about school choice. Democrats are far to
| the left compared to Europe in that.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Thanks for typing this all out. The idea that American
| liberals would be "right wing" in Europe is just plain
| wrong for reasons you've mentioned. There's a lot of
| nuance lost and you can't really compare the two. For
| instance Europe is full of Christian socialist parties:
| something unthinkable here in the states.
| beerandt wrote:
| Sure- but then you have to be careful defining labels.
|
| Trying to peg a generic one dimensional (left-right) or
| even two dimensional (social/fiscal) political position on
| justices is difficult, even with loosely defined labels/
| categories.
|
| It's much easier to look at justices relative position/
| rank on a per-topic basis.
|
| Alternatively, and less useful to the general public, but
| very useful to SCOTUS junkies, is looking at cross tabs of
| how often a particular justice votes with others.
| Especially when they break from the publically perceived
| left/right voting block, which is more often than most
| think.
|
| Scotusblog is full of this type of analysis for those
| interested:
|
| https://www.scotusblog.com/category/empirical-scotus/
|
| https://www.scotusblog.com/statistics/
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| And this is, in fact, precisely how the court is
| theoretically supposed to work. The two-dimensional
| partisan framing--which, unfortunately, is very real in
| other domains--is what's causing the court to break down.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Is the court breaking down?
| xxpor wrote:
| Everyone freaks out about social issues with SCOTUS (which is
| understandable), but their real impact is on economics. The
| destruction they've laid on the labor movement and help for
| big businesses is immense.
|
| Just look at the commentary around overturning Chevron
| deference and non-delegation. Absolutely apocalyptic.
| rcpt wrote:
| They had a chance to end California's housing disaster in
| Nordlinger vs. Hahn but ruled in the favor of landlords and
| speculators. Justice Stevens even admitted that the law is
| unlikely to change under standard democratic processes.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/90-1912.ZD.html
| rayiner wrote:
| Is it would be positively apocalyptic to reign in the all-
| powerful unelected fourth branch of government the framers
| conveniently forgot to list in the constitution. Or to
| prevent Congress from creating executive branch entities
| that exercise the powers of all three branches of
| government. The SEC can make rules, sue you for violating
| them, and then adjudicate your violation, all under one
| roof. Pretty sure that's exactly how Congress intended
| separation of powers to work!
| xxpor wrote:
| >adjudicate your violation, all under one roof.
|
| You still have Article III remedies in that case.
|
| If the extreme version of non-delegation took hold, it
| would be the end of all rational regulation. Do you
| REALLY want Congress writing technical documents about
| effective isotropic radiated power? Or the shape of curb
| ramps?
| rayiner wrote:
| I don't see how having article III remedies addresses the
| separation of powers issue. It just means you can kinda
| maybe fix up the damage afterward.
|
| I think it's fair to ask how far a non-delegation
| principle should go. There is clearly a continuum between
| legislation and enforcement discretion. But does that
| mean we should have no non-delegation principle at all?
| Is there a definable middle ground between Congress
| leaving it to executive discretion address technical
| minutea and Congress delegating oversight over entire
| sections of the economy to unelected bodies that can
| serve as judge, jury, and executioner?
|
| There are ways to maintain an administrative state
| without stuffing everything into the executive branch:
| https://www.theregreview.org/2019/12/18/rappaport-
| stronger-s...
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > Supreme court judges just do not have the conceptual framework
| to properly adjudicate this. I don't think it's going to be
| possible to teach them the difference between interface and
| implementation within the parameters of these arguments.
|
| I mostly agree with you, but let's give credit where credit is
| due. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, from TFA:
|
| > "[...] since 1992, [courts have said] the application-
| programming interface, of which the declaring code is a part, is
| not copyrightable. Implementing codes are. On that understanding,
| industries have built up around applications that know they can
| copy only what's necessary to run on the application, but they
| have to change everything else. That's what Google did here.
| That's why they took less than 1 percent of the Java code...
| Everybody knows that APIs, declaring codes, are not
| copyrightable. Implementing codes are. So please explain to me
| why we should now upend what the industry has viewed as the
| copyrightable elements, and has declared that some are methods of
| operation, and some are expressions. "
| sjg007 wrote:
| It does go back to the compaq days when they clean room cloned
| the IBM PC.
| jtchang wrote:
| Hold on while I copyright all accessor and modifier methods. From
| now on there will be a licensing fee if you ever use getters or
| setters.
| kls wrote:
| I am really not up on copyright law, but I see this as analogous
| to someone writing a book. Say I wrote a book and titled all of
| my chapters the same as another book, the book was given a
| different title and the chapters themselves where very different
| on the inside but naturally my table of contents looks exactly
| the same, would this be considered infringe in the publishing
| world (I don't know)?
|
| Also based on that:
|
| If it would why would API's be different?
|
| If not how was it applied differently here?
|
| What if in the above scenario, I added some extra chapters so the
| TOC has all the chapters the other book had, but the TOC is not a
| 1 for 1?
|
| If my analogy is wrong, what am I not seeing?
|
| I know as someone who writes software, API's not being
| copyrightable is preferable, but I would like to understand how
| the law sees it when dealing with real physicals works and
| understand if the law is applied the same when it moves to less
| concrete works.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Books are not equivalent to software because software has a
| functional purpose. While programming has creative elements,
| the primary goal of a program is to achieve certain functions
| (whereas the primary goal of a book is to enable creative
| expression or to record factual information).
|
| If I want to support a Windows program on Linux I have no
| choice but to implement the Windows API. Likewise, if I want to
| interface with a program that stores data in S3, I have to
| replicate the S3 API.
|
| That's why I think that there's no good analogy for software
| APIs among traditional media.
|
| As far as the law goes, Google's argument is that because
| software APIs are arbitrary choices and necessary to be copied
| for interoperability that software APIs are noncopyrightable
| under section (b) of this statute.
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Books can have a functional purpose. E.g. if it is a
| reference manual for a car. If you used the same table of
| contents for the reference manual, but the contents were
| substantially different, would that still be unlicensed
| copying?
| zucker42 wrote:
| Books don't have a functional purpose in the same way as
| software. With a book, there are many ways to state the
| exact same fact (and the fact itself is _not_ protected by
| copyright law). With a program, there 's only one way to
| call a particular function, or to write a function
| declaration that an existing program can call. The exact
| text used in a program is relevant to its functional
| purpose.
|
| A more apt analogy in the case of a reference manual is
| perhaps a competing manual that presented all the same
| maintenance information with different words, since they
| would achieve the same functional purpose with different
| expressive content.
| [deleted]
| stephen82 wrote:
| This is not good...not good at all!
|
| If Oracle wins, to me with zero knowledge around copyright laws
| and legalese topics, means small to medium companies will close
| down out of fear of getting sued for using or implementing a
| competitor's APIs.
|
| Not only that, it feels like the whole technological
| "civilization" will collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating,
| because thousands of people will lose their job simply because
| companies will prefer to close down than go to court with huge
| companies the size of IBM, Amazon, Alphabet, and Oracle to name a
| few, and that thought alone lead to financial meltdown...as if we
| didn't have enough problems already with the pandemic!
|
| If we continue like this, it would feel like living in "Minority
| Report", that we could get sued for simply thinking about
| implementing a competitor's API!
|
| On the positive side, I'm quite curious to see where this could
| go.
| TheDong wrote:
| This is an overreaction.
|
| We already are in the state you describe, except for patents.
| The doubly linked list is patented [0]. Selling something over
| the internet was patented [1]. The list could go on and on.
|
| Every major software company has so many patents that they
| could find an infringement in almost any software company.
|
| Why hasn't this happened? Because, like copyright, someone
| needs to actually bring suit. That doesn't happen that often.
| It happens more often with patents in the form of patent trolls
| actually, and there's no reason to believe api copyright suits
| would happen more often than patent suits... I think api
| copyright suits are actually going to be less lucrative and
| harder to prove on average.
|
| So yeah, it seems like the current state of software patents is
| already far worse than APIs being copyrightable would be, and
| yet the sky is not falling, civilization is not collapsing, and
| business continues like usual.
|
| [0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7028023B2/en
|
| [1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5715314A/en
| coolspot wrote:
| One question from a judge was that if "API is copyrightable" is
| bad, why didn't we see sky falling in last 4 years since
| federal court decided so?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Because the vast majority of tech companies disagree with the
| law, and were probably expecting SCOTUS to overturn the case.
| When they realize that they're leaving money on the table,
| then we're going to see claims and counterclaims all over the
| place.
| merb wrote:
| well it would be funny if amazon starts to sue oracle.
|
| https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-
| us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...
|
| I mean even the freaking headers are the same which some
| could consider an implementation detail.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > One question from a judge was that if "API is
| copyrightable" is bad, why didn't we see sky falling in last
| 4 years since federal court decided so?
|
| Which was a fairly stupid question from a Supreme Court
| Justice, because you'd think that they know that decisions of
| the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on issues _not_
| within their special subject matter jurisdiction (which
| copyright is not) are not binding authority on any lower
| court, as the lower courts (and, in fact, the CAFC itself)
| are bound by the actual precedent of the regional circuit
| court (even trial courts in, in this case, the Ninth Circuit,
| whose law the CAFC notionally was applying in its _Oracle v.
| Google_ decision, are not bound by the CAFC ruling, only by
| decisions actually issued by the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme
| Court.)
|
| So there is currently no binding precedent applicable to
| _any_ federal trial court that APIs are copyrightable, which
| is why the sky hasn 't fallen.
|
| You would think that, however much they might not understand
| APIs, Supreme Court Justices would be intimitately familiar
| with the appellate structure of the US federal courts.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > it feels like the whole technological "civilization" will
| collapse after this and I'm not exaggerating
|
| Well, the decision is binding on the US only so this is an
| exaggeration.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| This article really overstates the case by focusing on
| copyrightability while leaving fair use for a tag at the end.
|
| Winning on fair use is not a disaster for Google. Google winning
| on fair use on procedural grounds, if the Court uses that as an
| excuse not to even answer the copyrightability question (the
| narrowest possible grounds for a Google victory), does not,
| contrary to the article's claim that "a Google win on a narrow
| procedural question would create a lot of legal uncertainty in
| the software industry", create any _new_ legal uncertainty for
| the industry.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If Google wins on fair use, then re-implementing much (but not
| all) of a 10,000-element API is fair use. That leaves the
| industry somewhere near "APIs can be copyrighted, but that
| doesn't change anything".
| ghaff wrote:
| This whole general area has managed to be rather ambiguous for
| a long time now. One of my lawyer friends was reminding me
| yesterday that the Lotus v. Borland look-and-feel case was
| actually never decided at the SCOTUS level even though it was
| taken up because of a circuit split. SCOTUS split 4-4 and let
| the First Circuit opinion stand.
| f154hfds wrote:
| I started reading this article today thinking that the case was
| clear-cut - Oracle's wrong and Google is right. As I read the
| article and the comments I'm now not at all sure. We all are
| trying to come up with a good analogy to explain why APIs are
| distinct from implementations, why it's 'obvious' to a programmer
| how they're distinct, and how their rules should be distinct.
|
| But the more I think about it, and read feeble attempts to relate
| software to other industries, I am starting to think I was wrong.
| In my experience, especially where good design is encouraged and
| respected, I can spend far more time designing the API than
| implementing it! If I create a proprietary API shouldn't it be
| protected? Or am I misunderstanding the nature of the debate?
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I agree; a big part of the problem is that the whole concept of
| what an API is and what it does has really grown in the last 40
| years. The original IBM PC BIOS exposed an API but it was far
| simpler than the Java API. When we draw an analogy between a
| large industrial machine and all of it's levers and switches
| and buttons and the interrupt calls on an IBM PC BIOS, the
| analogy seems somewhat reasonable. It certainly feels like
| we're straining that analogy when we apply it to the Java API.
|
| Even so, the Java API is clearly documented and publicly
| available and anyone can look it over. It's clear that it
| provides a contract to the software developer saying things
| like "if you give me this data when you call this method, I
| will give you data that looks like this in return". The idea
| that an API is a contract, I think is sound and the analogy
| holds water, in my opinion.
|
| Is there really nothing creative about writing an API? Well, I
| think that's an arguable point. When you drive a car you steer
| a wheel and when you type you press buttons; it's arguable that
| these are simply obvious implementations that many people might
| independently develop on their own. It's mechanical and,
| perhaps, lacking in creativity. But the Java API? Some
| portions, for sure, are obvious: any collection of things has a
| "length" method. But someone did come up with a plan for
| managing the namespaces and the package names and some packages
| have APIs that are pretty clever and, perhaps, reveal true
| creativity.
|
| Still I'm against protecting APIs from third-party re-
| implementation. I did not find Oracle's arguments at all
| compelling and, in my view, that was really their job here.
| Instead they pretended that this idea of an API as a contract
| anyone could re-implement was totally alien to them and that
| struck me as a bit dishonest.
|
| I'd like to see a more compelling argument before we upend how
| we thought APIs worked for the past forty years.
| orev wrote:
| This could be easily explained using an analogy like a pipe. If
| you need to connect a hose to your house, the connector
| (interface) needs to match the spigot size and threads. The API
| is simply the information about the size and thread
| measurement, along with the knowledge that you can get water
| out of it when you turn the handle. Having this knowledge and
| building compatible hoses or spigots doesn't mean you have
| stolen anything from the company who made the original spigot.
|
| I could easily come up with dozens of analogies that explain
| this concept in terms understandable by senior citizens, and
| it's inexcusable that this lawyer can't do the same.
| babesh wrote:
| That is a terrible analogy since the potential conceptual
| range of APIs is so wide and because it does disservice to
| the conceptual power of APIs.
|
| Good APIs embody the key architectural and conceptual
| decisions. They define the key concepts and how they
| interact. But at the level of a programming language, this is
| of immense scope and power. Java defines an imperative
| language with built in garbage collection with abstraction
| from physical hardware.
|
| Furthermore, the real distinction between API and
| implementation is that API are that which needs to be exposed
| to the world.
|
| Programming languages are more akin to defining the
| fundamental laws of a universe. Physics to chemistry.
|
| It is true that other APIs are of much smaller scope but the
| point is that the range is so wide.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's actually a great analogy in that respect, as there are
| substantial tradeoffs involved in the design of pipe
| connector types, and the design of a particular connection
| / thread standard embodies key architectural and conceptual
| decisions.
| akerro wrote:
| >Justice Clarence Thomas compared Google's copying of the Java
| APIs to a football team taking a rival's playbook.
|
| Maybe it should be compared to English dictionary, where American
| English cannot use words from pre-existing British English.
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I thought that until I got to Google's closing remarks. They said
| that 1) the Federal Circuit didn't really do a _de novo_ review
| like they said they did, and therefore that their overturning the
| jury didn 't have the excuse that Oracle said it did, and 2) that
| Oracle was factually incorrect in several statements it made in
| the hearing. If those claims are accurate, Google is likely to at
| least win on fair use.
| mwfunk wrote:
| Alito/Thomas/Kavanaugh are clearly on the wrong side of this, big
| freaking surprise there. If Oracle wins this is going to be
| catastrophic for our whole industry (in the US at least). Things
| are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
| exrook wrote:
| I'd highly encourage anyone interested in this case to hear the
| oral arguments for themselves, you can listen to them here:
| https://www.c-span.org/video/?469263-1/google-v-oracle-ameri...
|
| While I believe that it would be better for society if the court
| sides with Google, I personally think that APIs can be a creative
| work, and thus would have copyright protection under the law.
| However one of Google's arguments is that Oracle is trying to use
| copyright to acquire a patent-like right, referencing the case of
| Baker v. Selden[0]. Despite being from 1879(!) I found this case
| to be especially relevant and I'm quite interested to see how the
| court will consider it into their opinion.
|
| In his arguments, Oracle's lawyer argues that declaring code is
| not distinguishable from implementing code and thus deserves all
| the same copyright protections. As a programmer I find this
| argument quite unconvincing, as there is clearly a technical
| distinction in many systems, see: .h files, dynamic linking, etc.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Selden
| blunte wrote:
| It is absurd that "judges" should be in the position to judge
| issues which they have no understanding of. I would bet that at
| least some of the members of the Supreme Court do not even know
| how to check and send email. In the same way they depend on
| others to perform basic and advanced computer tasks, they should
| depend on a "jury" of tech experts to filter the cases and
| provide suggestions or hopefully reasonable analogies to concepts
| the judges can comprehend.
|
| But now, on the topic of copyrighting APIs... it's stupid, and
| it's protectionist, and it's the kind of thing a company does
| when they can't compete or want to try to block competition. Most
| types of copyright are bogus for the same reasons. Not only is
| there the strong possibility of more than one person coming up
| with the same idea at approximately the same time, in different
| places, but very few ideas are truly unique or revolutionary.
| Instead, it becomes a race to see who can copyright (or patent)
| something first - either defensively or with future hopes of
| preventing competition or extracting payment from a competitor.
|
| If modern copyright and patent law had always existed, humanity
| would be decades or perhaps centuries behind where it is now.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| You are describing Supreme Court clerks with your first
| suggestion.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_law_clerks_of_the_S...
| blunte wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that even a top performing law
| school grad would be a subject matter expert comparable to a
| 5 or 10+ year developer for this topic.
| [deleted]
| yarg wrote:
| Google broke compatibility with Java, so I don't think that the
| argument that this nullifies the right to reimplementation holds
| water.
|
| If Android had been implemented in such a way as to allow pre-
| existing java applications to execute natively this would be a
| very different situation.
| syspec wrote:
| > Jonathan Schwartz's (CEO of Sun when Google re-implemented the
| Java APIs):
|
| > "Google's lawyer, Robert van Nest, asked Schwartz whether,
| during his tenure at Sun, Java APIs were considered proprietary
| or protected by Sun."
|
| > "'No,' Schwartz said in explaining the nature of open software.
| 'These are open APIs, and we wanted to bring in more people...we
| wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many people as
| possible.'"
|
| I feel like I would raise this fact repeatedly, if i was trying
| to make my case.
| Lammy wrote:
| I would too, but I assume the legal team has more experience
| with what points tend to matter in court and that "what the
| previous owner would have done" must not be one of them.
| kodablah wrote:
| This has been brought up many times in many of the cases. IIRC,
| it has repeatedly been ignored as not an official statement
| (same w/ his past blog posts) and that the original intent is
| unrelated to whether they are protectable.
| thebean11 wrote:
| IANAL, but it's surprising that the original intent, or the
| manner in which a product was sold, would not matter. That
| means a company can trick people into an ecosystem by lying
| about their licensing terms, then suddenly pull the rug out?
| mindcrime wrote:
| Maybe we get lucky and the SCOTUS ruling comes down against
| uncopyable API's. But while that seems questionable at the
| moment, it's important to remember one thing: there is always an
| "out" even in the "nuclear option" case and that is "have
| Congress change the law".
|
| It seems to me that now is the time to start thinking about
| putting together a mass effort to get Congress to change
| copyright law, to establish clearly the semantic distinction
| between API and implementation, and to make it clear that the API
| part can be "copied" in the name of interoperability.
|
| No, that's not an easy thing to accomplish, especially without
| armies of highly paid lobbyists, but I'm guessing that a few big
| companies - like _cough_ Google _cough_ might be interested in
| supporting such an effort.
| [deleted]
| foota wrote:
| Man, wholesale copyright (and patent) reform towards a more
| restrictive view wrt what is copyrightable and duration would
| be like Christmas for me.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| +1 to this.
|
| More generally, I feel that one of the main reasons the Supreme
| Court is such a powerful body nowadays, and why cases like this
| are considered so important, is because Congress has become so
| ineffectual. We have internalized the idea that the Supreme
| Court has the last word on every matter before it. But it
| emphatically does not. The Supreme Court is only the last word
| on constitutional cases. So many decisions - this one, certain
| decisions on gerrymandering - are completely overturnable by
| Congress.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _More generally, I feel that one of the main reasons the
| Supreme Court is such a powerful body nowadays, and why cases
| like this are considered so important, is because Congress
| has become so ineffectual. We have internalized the idea that
| the Supreme Court has the last word on every matter before
| it. But it emphatically does not. The Supreme Court is only
| the last word on constitutional cases. So many decisions -
| this one, certain decisions on gerrymandering - are
| completely overturnable by Congress._
|
| I agree 100% with those sentiments.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The Supreme Court is only the last word on constitutional
| cases.
|
| No more so than statutory or any other cases; just as
| regulation can be changed by the executive and statute can be
| changed by the Congress, the Constitution can be amended by
| the process set out in the document itself.
|
| The Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of the _current
| state_ of the law, but no law that it applies, including the
| Constitution, is immutable.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I observe the 1978 report that recommended that computer
| programs should be subject to copyright included the following
| recommendation in its conclusion:
|
| << Any legislation dealing with either computer or photocopying
| issues enacted and based upon these recommendations should be
| subject to a process of periodic review. >>
|
| http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/PDF/Chapter5.pdf
| curt15 wrote:
| >but I'm guessing that a few big companies - like cough Google
| cough might be interested in supporting such an effort.
|
| Microsoft also supported Google in this case.
| [deleted]
| pyb wrote:
| It would be initially problematic, but I do not believe that an
| Oracle win would be that disruptive in the long run. What would
| happen is that API providers would from now on have to provide
| standardized legal assurances that users are allowed to implement
| their API (in part or in whole). APIs that do not provide these
| assurances will go mostly unused.
|
| As an imperfect analogy, think about the fact that many companies
| no longer want to use GPL code because of the legal
| ramifications. Open source authors would want their code used at
| those places use other licenses such as MIT.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| I'm curious if the Hush-A-Phone case is any precedent:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... .
| It involved a company that made a device you connected to your
| telephone who got sued by AT&T and won. The compatibility with a
| proprietary phone network is vaguely analogous to an API.
| beervirus wrote:
| It's always dangerous to try to read the tea leaves based on what
| questions the Justices ask. We really don't know yet what they're
| going to do. Anyone who says otherwise is mostly just guessing.
| RichardCA wrote:
| No one's discussed Lotus v. Borland yet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_In....
|
| The issue was that the Borland Quattro spreadsheet had the
| ability to emulate the menu hierarchy of Lotus 1-2-3.
|
| So the SCOTUS was asked to weigh in on whether a software menu
| system represents a copyrightable expression of an idea.
|
| What ended up happening was one justice recused himself and the
| eight remaining members were evenly split.
|
| In essence, they threw up their hands and gave up. It may as well
| have been a coin toss.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Lets Say that that Oracle wins. Does that mean that all 100+
| companies who have copywrites on their software which all include
| "Helper.GetGUID" or "Calendar.NewMeeting" are going to sue each
| other to find out who the 1 true owner of the "Helper.GetGUID"
| API call is?
| TheDong wrote:
| One of the ways copyright and patents differ is that patents
| can be infringed even if it's proven you had no prior knowledge
| of said patent, but copyright requires actual copying to
| infringe.
|
| Independently arriving at the same API name is a defense from
| copyright violations. If both of us write the exact same method
| name, and we can both prove we didn't copy the other's, that's
| enough. We both have copyright over our own api call that we
| wrote.
|
| Copyright probably shouldn't apply in any case that we could
| both independently create the same thing (in the same way the
| sentence "Hi, how are you" isn't copyrightable, but a chapter
| of shakespeare is -- the former is not a real expression of
| unique creativity).
|
| So no, copyright does not determine the "1 true owner" of
| something that was not copied. That's patents.
| mathraki wrote:
| Where are the expert witnesses in this case?? Do we really expect
| judges in their 60s and 70s to understand basics of coding in
| order to come to the right conclusion??
|
| I put myself in their shoes, if I had never looked at a line of
| code I couldn't even start to imagine what an API vs real code
| is. I'd probably think it's some made up concept that Google is
| using to save money and circumvent the law.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand
| basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion??
|
| Can substitute any field for "coding" above and come to the
| same conclusion.
|
| Quickly getting up to speed on the terminology and issues of
| fields in which they have no formal training or first hand
| experience is a big part of the job description of being a
| justice.
| notsuoh wrote:
| I don't think so, coding is so different than it has ever
| been, and is a different paradigm that most other things.
| Take farming, for example. Fundamentally farming is 100,000
| years old. Getting up to speed on modern methods is just
| adding something else to the stack and, while complicated,
| those methods aren't totally foreign for someone who
| understands what farming is.
|
| Something like coding is so alien to a 70-80 year old it's
| basically incomprehensible. That won't be the case with us in
| 50 years when were that age because we understand it, but
| there will probably be other things at that point that are
| equally incomprehensible.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Code is a repeatable (executable) list of instructions that can
| describe a process. Perform the instructions, execute the
| process.
|
| Processes--and a good example is business processes like SOPs,
| etc.--have inputs and outputs.
|
| An API is a name for that process, plus a description of the
| required inputs.
|
| Can you copyright a name and a description of inputs for a
| process?
| bismuthsalt wrote:
| Can you copyright Harry Potter the character? Or can anyone
| use recognizable Harry Potter reproductions in commercial
| context, be it alternative books, movies or merchandise?
| ohmygeek wrote:
| This is where the confusion lies: Google claims Oracle is
| copyrighting an interface to Harry Potter (as per your
| example) -- i.e., they are claiming copyright to any / all
| characters that are (1) a boy in his early teens (2) has
| magical powers (3) goes to wizard school.
|
| Now, the question is, where do we draw the line: As per
| Oracle, there cannot be any other character that does what
| Harry Potter does.
| bismuthsalt wrote:
| That's a stretch. Oracle is claiming copyright on a
| specific API with a specific name, specific organization
| and specific individual components / attributes. It is
| not claiming copyright on all standard lib APIs. In fact,
| there is no evidence that Oracle has any intention
| whatsoever to sue Google over Go or Dart.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Copyright law already allows you to copyright specific
| combinations of unprotectable elements. It's called thin
| copyright, it's why Katy Parry got sued and lost, and
| it's software application is called Structure, Sequence,
| and Organization (SSO). You can in fact claim copyright
| on all characters that look like Harry Potter, because
| the standard for copyright infringement is "access and
| substantial similarity". This is because if your
| copyright doesn't extend to someone blatantly tracing
| over your work, then it's not a copyright.
|
| You specifically need to argue that the API itself - the
| specific combination of types in a specific order, with a
| given set of Unicode or ASCII characters to identify it -
| is not copyrightable, not just that it's made up of
| uncopyrightable things. This is harder, because this same
| practice in other contexts (e.g. music, literature, and
| so on) is very much protectable. You need to argue that
| software is different.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| You actually can copyright a character. Disney made sure of
| that. Of course this only extends to the same kind of
| medium.
|
| The description and name matter a lot for this, and are
| typically quite general.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Where are the expert witnesses in this case?
|
| Expert witnesses play a role in trials, they play no direct
| role in appeals where fact claims (to the extent they are
| reviewable at all, which is normally limited when, as in this
| case, there is a jury-trial-by-right, because otherwise you
| obviate the right to a jury trial, though its worth noting one
| of the issues in this case is that the Federal Circuit tossed
| aside the jury verdict using a standard which is not usually
| appropriate for review of fact questions in such a scenario)
| are decided by review of the trial record and, to the extent
| that the trial record is not sufficient, remand to the lower
| courts for further proceedings with legal guidance.
|
| > Do we really expect judges in their 60s and 70s to understand
| basics of coding in order to come to the right conclusion?
|
| We expect the parties to have developed their fact claims at
| trial or, failing that, to be able to explain to judges why any
| issues needing factual evidence are insufficiently developed in
| the trial evidence such that if they were critical it would
| require remand (and the reason better be something like "we
| were improperly prevented by the trial court from presenting
| evidence" or "this is a issue that somehow was allowed to be
| raised for the first time on appeal so we had no opportunity to
| present evidence on it at trial".)
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Where are the expert witnesses in this case??
|
| In the trial court.
| gpm wrote:
| And in the amici briefs (though they're not called expert
| witnesses there)
| sjg007 wrote:
| To play devil's advocate: Architectural diagrams/design
| specifications for physical buildings are copyrightable. The
| implementation is obviously whatever the builder does. But in
| general, I think that is a pretty close analogy to APIs and
| implementation code. APIs also capture some sense of overall
| system design as well. So that may lend further credence to
| support copyrights.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Design specs like door sizes, sink arrangements etc are not
| copyrighted.
|
| You're probably thinking about the reproduction of the design
| document, not adherence to the specifications that document
| describes.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Those are common things which are excluded. So maybe Google
| has some argument on the parts... Oracle has an argument on
| the whole.
|
| https://www.aia.org/articles/26591-understanding-the-
| scope-o...
|
| To quote:
|
| """Under the AWCPA, an architectural work is statutorily
| defined as "the design of a building as embodied in any
| tangible medium of expression, including a building,
| architectural plans or drawings," and "includes the overall
| form as well as the arrangement and composition of spaces
| and elements in the design, but does not include individual
| standard features," such as common windows, doors, and
| other staple building components. Accordingly, per the
| definition, while individual standard features and
| architectural elements classifiable as ideas or concepts
| are not themselves copyrightable, an architect's original
| combination or arrangement of such elements may be."""
| gen220 wrote:
| I guess the question is: is the API in question a
| blueprint, or a building code?
|
| My intuition says that it's... somewhere in-between?
| sjg007 wrote:
| A building code is something different. It's more like a
| requirement.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Not even remotely the same. Screw threads, hole sizes, width
| of timber etc ie. specifications are the same.
|
| People make a big deal about beautiful apis. Almost all apis
| are simply functional. The complexity lies in the
| implementation not the specification.
| jimbokun wrote:
| API design largely determines whether a performant, correct
| implementation is even feasible within a given time frame.
| Setting aside whether or not developers can then
| successfully use the API to accomplish their goals.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| Yep, it's like patenting the ingredient list instead of
| the recipe. It ignores the process and says no ones
| allowed to cook any combination of fish, flour, potato,
| milk, and eggs.
|
| The unique food might be fish balls, but it also covers
| fish and chips, and a million other things that could be
| done with that API.
| pintxo wrote:
| Staying in this analogy, aren't APIs more like pictures or
| verbal descriptions of the facade of the building?
|
| An API spec will not (necessarily) provide you with any
| internal implementation detail. Architectural diagrams/design
| specifications very likely will do.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Therefore what, a block diagram of components? Already
| copyrightable.
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| To me an API is more like a survey of the land. If the
| architect doesn't know the survey, then the plans might not
| be compatible with the features of the land... but he could
| still try. The builder also doesn't need the surveyors
| permission to build on the land, the survey is just a
| description of the land. Owning the survey / API doesn't do
| anything to change anyone's rights.
| tjchear wrote:
| I disagree that the IRL analogy of API is architectural
| diagrams. A better analogy for API would be an agreement on
| how to communicate what needs to be done (and what has been
| done) between two persons. The aggregate effect of that over
| thousands of people is a working system, coordinated by the
| mastermind (programmer) who dictates the actual orchestration
| of the entire system.
|
| If API is copyrightable, I'd love to be the first person to
| copyright the following API (and variations thereof):
| class Processor { void init(); void
| process(...); void cleanup(); };
|
| If I get a nickel for every violation of that copyright...
| sjg007 wrote:
| > A better analogy for API would be an agreement on how to
| communicate what needs to be done (and what has been done)
| between two persons.
|
| Is that not what blueprints do?
| tjchear wrote:
| Blueprint describes the thing that is to be built. API
| describes how two parties talk to each other.
|
| I'd say API is closer to a protocol or a contract than it
| is to architectural blueprint.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Well a blueprint communicates from the architect to the
| builder/carpenter/plumber etc...
| Twisol wrote:
| Then the blueprint is the contents of the communication,
| not the method of communication itself.
|
| The blueprint would be communicated by mail or
| sneakernet.
|
| You can copyright the contents of an email (indeed, I
| think they have an implicit copyright, don't they?), but
| you can't copyright the way in which emails in general
| are transmitted and exchange. (That would probably be a
| matter for patent.)
| TheDong wrote:
| Copyright violation requires copying, and independent
| derivation is a valid defense.
|
| Patents don't require proof of copying and are always
| infringed, even with no knowledge.
|
| If you wrote that API, and I wrote that exact same API
| without having seen yours, you wouldn't be able to sue me
| for copyright violation.
|
| All I'd have to show in court is that there's a decent
| probability that I independently created the same API, at
| which point we'd both have full copyright over our own
| (identical) APIs, and more likely it would be ruled un-
| copyrightable due to being too trivial / not creative
| enough.
| suby wrote:
| I like the analogy of computer keyboards. The layout
| (QWERTY) would be the API, but keyboards differentiate
| themselves in numerous and substantial ways. It would be
| unworkable madness if each keyboard manufacturer was
| required to use a different layout.
| defen wrote:
| My understanding is that QWERTY was developed to solve a
| mechanical problem with early typewriters in the 19th
| century (frequent jams). According to wikipedia the
| inventor spent 5 years developing it. I don't see why he
| shouldn't have been able to profit from that invention.
| The only reason we use QWERTY now is due to the fact that
| early non-mechanical keyboards were designed to be used
| easily by people who had trained with mechanical ones. If
| "licensing fees" for QWERTY back then had been an issue,
| manufacturers would have just used a non-copyrightable
| ABCD... layout, or paid for QWERTY. I don't see it as a
| disastrous outcome.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Putting studs 16" on center however is not copyrightable.
| [deleted]
| didibus wrote:
| I would make the argument that what distinguishes APIs from code
| is that APIs cannot be executed, they are not code because the
| computer cannot run it. And only code is copyrightable, code
| requires to be executable on some machine. Thus it is clear that
| only the implementation is copyrightable.
|
| That said, at this point, I don't even care about the
| interpretation of the law, this issue has to just be addressed by
| the executive branch, truth be told, the rules should be
| explicitly stated, and I almost feel someone could make a case
| and sue the government with being so vague, allowing multi
| billion businesses to get built and a whole industry assuming
| they had the correct interpretation of the law, when in fact it
| gets interpreted differently. I don't know if this is possible to
| sue the government for, but like, how enraging is it if everyone
| for years clearly thinks they know the rules and all abide by
| some interpretation of it worth billions of dollars. Clearly the
| law needed to be revised a long time ago.
| syspec wrote:
| > This is a widespread practice in the software industry. Oracle,
| for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that customers who
| built software for Amazon's cloud platform could easily switch to
| Oracle's rival cloud platform.
|
| Oracle themselves are doing it, could someone with a better legal
| mind explain to me how this doesn't make the case simpler to
| decide?
|
| Is it that they're saying, it should be illegal but since it is
| not we are playing the game by the current rules, but we hope to
| change those rules?
| gojomo wrote:
| As far as I know, Amazon isn't objecting. So, Oracle can say:
| we're "doing it" with permission.
| zaphar wrote:
| If this case goes the wrong way Oracle may find itself the
| subject of a lawsuit.
| moonchild wrote:
| They surely know that. Java is a bigger money maker for
| them than cloud. (Large parts of amazon's cloud are
| implemented _in java_.)
| curt15 wrote:
| Isn't OpenJDK the standard implementation of Java these
| days? Why would Amazon be using something different?
| eikenberry wrote:
| They are probably thinking that they could negotiate licenses
| with the other big companies easier than any startup could,
| thus locking out a lot of competition.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Yes, I am sure Amazon will be happy to license their S3 API
| to help their customers migrate over to Oracle's cloud
| product. I think not! :-P
| crazygringo wrote:
| Does anyone have any idea, if Oracle wins, what the ramifications
| for Google/Android will be?
|
| Because Android is so entrenched, there's no "going back". Google
| merely paying a fine doesn't change the fact it's still using
| Java API's moving forwards. Google would have to license the Java
| API from Oracle... but then who sets the price? Oracle could set
| something absurdly 1000x higher than reasonable by holding the
| entire Android ecosystem hostage, no? Would the court decide not
| just penalties for past usage, but a negotiation for future
| usage? How would they determine that? (And if they did, couldn't
| that create a moral hazard? Companies steal IP from someone who
| refuses to sell, get "too big to fail", and get to keep the
| stolen IP in the end.)
|
| I'm not familiar with how the law relates to ongoing conflicts
| that are so massive they can't be undone without great harm to
| individuals and businesses far beyond the actual parties in
| dispute.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does anyone have any idea, if Oracle wins, what the
| ramifications for Google/Android will be?
|
| I understand that Android currently uses OpenJDK, under its
| public license, so I think the ramifications will be "Google
| pays buttloads of money to Oracle for past misuse and continues
| happily on its way". At least as far as the Java APIs are
| concerned; there will be lawsuits flying back and forth
| everywhere in the industry over every other reused API that
| isn't explicitly licensed, which will probably also effect
| Android in some way.
| jgilias wrote:
| To me the best explanation of an Application Programming
| Interface (spelling it out on purpose) is really the comparison
| with industrial machinery. It's really the switches, knobs and
| levers of a machine that you use to make it do something. I get
| it that an API being textual throws non-technical people off. But
| for a programmer functionally there's not much difference between
| a physical object, like a steering wheel, and some API call to
| invoke. They are both just something you use to interact with the
| underlying system. Hence the term.
|
| It's sort of perplexing that Google would send someone who can't
| explain this point of view well.
| salawat wrote:
| They did. In legal parlance, that's a method-of-operation, and
| the relevant case law was Seldon(?). In which someone wrote a
| book on double entry accounting, then sued someone for
| infringement of their forms. The process of using a two column
| form couldn't be copyrighted, since that would essentially be a
| patent, and the Court determined a book teaching you how to do
| a thing implicitly grants license to do so without jeopardy of
| infringement. API's represent the documentation and actuators
| to make a machine do it's thing, therefore, both by test of "is
| it a control or thing allowing one to control another thing?"
| (Method-of-operation in common parlance) or "is it a
| communicative work teaching you to how to operate a specific
| process?" It passes muster.
|
| I thought that was rather straightforward.
|
| What wasn't straightforward to me was Oracle trying to argue
| that somehow, it makes sense that everyone should be forced to
| write their own language runtimes, and that somehow you can
| separate Java the language and virtual machine from the entity
| hierarchy, or that that is even a tenable state of affairs.
| Goldstein should have been slamming the "in Java" point _hard_.
|
| Further, why was no one arguing that programming languages
| themselves are the front-end manifestations of interoperability
| by converting high level linguistics down to machine code?
|
| This isn't hard.
| ummonk wrote:
| Exactly. It would be like a company copyrighting the shape of
| its proprietary replacement parts, and then suing another
| company for providing 3rd party replacement parts.
| tasubotadas wrote:
| >Oracle, for example, re-implemented Amazon's S3 API so that
| customers who built software for Amazon's cloud platform could
| easily switch to Oracle's rival cloud platform.
|
| So if Oracle wins here, they will get fu _xx_ ed by Amazon?
| [deleted]
| coldpie wrote:
| Who knows. Does Amazon implement any of Oracle's APIs? This
| ruling is about to make the software patent mess look like a
| walk in the park.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does Amazon implement any of Oracle's APIs?
|
| They reimplement MySQL for Aurora Serverless, but losing
| Aurora Serverless MySQL probably hurts Amazon less than
| losing their S3 clone hurts Oracle, and in any case MySQL is
| GPL and Amazon doesn't redistribute their implementation, so
| they are probably within the license anyway.
| josefx wrote:
| If it is anything like the CPU patent mess then they might
| join forces and just sue anyone else out of existence
| Intel/AMD OTP.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| I would wholly expect Amazon to sue over S3 implementations
| by Oracle, IBM for SQL, etc. I would want the whole industry
| to target Oracle. Get their pound of flesh.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| Mutually Assured Destruction from the fallout of a terrible
| decision that forces the SC to re-evaluate (through another
| case etc) is better than letting something like this
| settle.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Same but I think the problem is tech people don't buy
| Oracle products on purpose, suits do that.
| buttersbrian wrote:
| That's probably true.
|
| Honestly, companies shouldn't be worried about the
| FANG's, because they will create alliances and largely
| refrain from suing one another. It's the never-ending,
| death-by-a-thousand-cuts onslaught from trolls that will
| murder small/medium outfits.
|
| The east texas troll court is going to have a boom like
| it was 1840s California just to support all the
| litigation in our near future -- if this passes.
| coldpie wrote:
| And then Oracle sues Amazon and IBM back for implementing
| some API or other that they own through one of their
| billion acquisitions...
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| Amazon release their S3 client libraries under the Apache
| license. Creating a backend for that client is permitted under
| the license. So all these S3 clones are fine.
| merb wrote:
| not really. their client is under the apache license but not
| the implementation of the server, where the api is defined.
|
| to use the client (boto) with a server you need to CLONE the
| api. even the headers which are named: "x-amz-server-side-
| encryption-customer-algorithm" I doubt that oracle would need
| to call that "x-amz-server-side-encryption-customer-
| algorithm"
| granzymes wrote:
| The article mentions that Google faced some tough questions on
| their merger doctrine argument (that because there was only one
| way to implement the declaring code Oracle can't preclude Google
| from reusing it) but it doesn't really mention the fact that
| Oracle faced much tougher questioning on their procedural
| argument that the Federal Circuit correctly overturned the
| district court jury decision.
|
| Listening to the oral arguments I have a hard time counting to 5
| either way on the issue of API copyright and Google's merger
| doctrine argument, but I think it's quite likely that there are 5
| votes to send the case back to the Federal Circuit with
| instructions to take another look at fair use.
|
| Essentially, the district court jury found in favor of Google on
| fair use and the Federal Circuit set that verdict aside on the
| grounds that no reasonable person could conclude there was fair
| use. None of the justices sounded happy about that.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| The important part is that the Federal Circuit overturned the
| decision of a jury which is not generally allowed. If it was
| just a lower court judge, they could make that kind of ruling
| without much controversy. The reasonable person argument just
| seems like an excuse to overturn the decision of a jury. If
| there were problems with the process, that can be used to
| overturn the jury decision.
| actuator wrote:
| > To re-implement Java, Google needed to copy the names and
| argument types of functions like java.lang.Math.max.
|
| If there are "copying" examples like this in the case, I am
| surprised it wasn't thrown out way earlier.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| << For decades prior to Oracle's lawsuit, most people in the
| software industry assumed that APIs couldn't be copyrighted. >>
|
| Well, what were they supposed to assume?
|
| It's shameful that it's been 40 years since computer programs
| were explicitly protected in the US under copyright law, and this
| remains an unsettled question.
|
| This situation is an extremely poor advertisement for the
| practice of passing vague laws and letting their boundaries be
| settled over time by court cases and precedent.
|
| It's painful to have to listen to lawyers argue by an analogy
| between function declarations and Harry Potter chapter titles.
| SloopJon wrote:
| I saw one question from Gorsuch quoted in reports about the
| arguments that bothered me: "What do we do about the fact that
| the other competitors, Apple, Microsoft ... have, in fact, been
| able to come up with phones that work just fine without engaging
| in this kind of copying?"
|
| macOS and iOS (and indeed Apple itself) would not exist as we
| know them today, if at all, without very liberal cross
| pollination of APIs. In a parallel universe where APIs are
| copyrighted to the extent that Oracle wants, GNU would not exist.
| Konqueror and Safari could not use Microsoft's XMLHttpRequest().
| The list goes on and on.
| zepto wrote:
| You say GNU would not exist, which is true in it's current
| form. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have had a Unix-like
| (although not strictly compatible) free system.
|
| It's also true that Safari couldn't have used XMLHttpRequest
| _unless Microsoft had licensed it_. But that might have sped up
| the incorporation of an open standard alternative.
|
| It would definitely have created a different history to the one
| we have now if APIs were assumed to be copyrighted, but it's
| not reasonable to just assume that everything that has been
| based on them would not have been built some other way.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Unix-like
|
| You mean something that implements all the APIs that the Bell
| Labs never licensed to anybody?
| [deleted]
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Darwin copies Unix APIs from AT&T. They have engaged in this
| kind of copying. They just haven't been sued about it.
| curt15 wrote:
| I thought Goldstein gave a satisfactory answer here by making
| the analogy to the difference between English and French.
| bambax wrote:
| Slightly OT but not really: why didn't Google buy Sun when it
| could?? I'll never understand this.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or Google could have come to terms with Sun with respect to
| Java. I'm sure they regret not having done so at this point.
| Whatever you may think of Oracle in this case, Google basically
| f'ed up big time.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Silly arrogant Google should have bought Sun MS when they had the
| chance ...
|
| Or just settled with Oracle a long time ago.
| filereaper wrote:
| Maybe someone should have bought out Sun and not let their crown
| jewels go to the most opportunistic company that's out there?
|
| Could have avoided all of this and as a society we could have
| moved on an built better things. Only the lawyers won here.
|
| Something for the current FAANG's to consider, buy the company
| that has goodwill but isn't doing well financially for various
| reasons.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| This would have protected the IBM PC BIOS wouldn't it? The BIOS
| interrupts are an API. Would it not also apply in retrospect?
| Could IBM not sue everyone who ever made a clone now? Or is there
| a statute of limitations?
| izacus wrote:
| I haven't seen a single positive article about Google from
| ArsTechnica (and plenty of ones that were overly
| sensiationalistic, especially aroudn Android which I'm pretty
| familiar with professionally).
|
| Is there any more independent media article describing what went
| on in the hearing?
| bokononon wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/07/google_oracle_api/
| LockAndLol wrote:
| I bet if this goes through, the US will try to enforce a
| completely backwards view on the rest of the world in the name of
| profit. One can only hope that at least some countries will tell
| the US where to stick it with idiotic laws like that.
|
| Absolute lunacy.
| doesnotexist wrote:
| Should Oracle win this case, I predict that Free Software
| licenses will emerge as the clear market choice. Licenses that
| enshrine interoperability along with the freedom to modify or
| reimplement in part or wholesale will suddenly provide
| significantly more value over non-Free software which will be a
| proprietary minefield and the value will not be for technical but
| purely from legal liability. Anyone setting out to do something
| new would be wise to build on top of software they are at least
| assured will not be used against them in court should they find
| success building ontop of it.
| generationP wrote:
| Yes, but we'll get a major bit rot problem with existing
| programming languages and probably even file formats (PDF
| anyone?). And that's before we get to open-source drivers for
| mainstream hardware, whose APIs are surely not soon going to be
| released from copyright?
| c-smile wrote:
| > Should Oracle win this case, ... Free Software ...
|
| Hmmm... First Free Software project that will dye after this is
| WINE that implements Windows API ( https://www.winehq.org/ )
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Not at all. Please read page 14 of the amicus curiae brief in
| support of Google by Microsoft (https://www.supremecourt.gov/
| DocketPDF/18/18-956/128381/2020...). Here is the relevant
| paragraph:
|
| """ In another example from the 1990s, an open-source
| developer created a program called WINE, which al- lowed
| developers to enable Windows applications to run on computers
| that used the Linux open-source system, without explicit
| authorization from Microsoft. Gratz & Lemley, supra, at 611.
| To create WINE, the developer "use[d] the same hierarchy of
| function names" of various Windows APIs. Id. at 612. Years
| later, Microsoft created "the inverse of WINE,"
| reimplementing the structure of certain Linux APIs to create
| the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a program that allowed Linux
| programs to run on Windows. Ibid. The Windows-Linux
| experience shows that reuse of functional code is a "two- way
| street" that benefits both the original creator and the
| follow-on developer--and ultimately the consumer. """
|
| Not to mention there's no monetary chest at the end of that
| fight (and the creation of WSL wouldn't bode well for them if
| they were to make a case at all).
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Companies don't bother with principled consistency, and so
| I wouldn't expect any from Microsoft if this goes Oracle's
| way. It's totally possible that Microsoft thinks APIs being
| non-copyrightable is good for them on net, but that if
| SCOTUS decides otherwise that they might as well go crush
| WINE anyway since they now have the means.
| cortesoft wrote:
| What would the benefit to MS be to crush w WINE. They
| have made a big effort to rebuild their reputation with
| developers, and WINE doesn't really hurt their bottom
| line. They have no incentive.
| belorn wrote:
| It will depend a lot on how wide a decision SCOTUS makes,
| and that fair use is interpreted in a very different way.
| Wine is not a windows replacement nor can Microsoft
| really show any negative impact on the market for windows
| license sales because of Wine. Wine (recursive backronym
| for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is "simply" a compatibility
| layer that convert between Windows ABI calls into native
| linux system calls. Wine is not an operative system
| replacement for windows, and wine user base compared to
| windows is comparable so tiny that any argument based on
| market impact should be taken with a lot of skepticism.
|
| In addition I would be a bit surprised if wine has copied
| 11000 lines of header files from windows, arranged
| identically to Microsoft Windows source code.
| extropy wrote:
| Wine allows running windows applications without windows
| lincense, directly taking revenue from Microsoft who
| arguably invested a ton in making documentation and
| developer tools to make those applications.
|
| It seems you are arguing mainly because the user base is
| so much smaller it does not count. The law does not work
| that way.
|
| Windows SDK contains tens of thousands of lines in header
| files for those DLLs Wine implements. Not saying Wine
| copied them outright, but the opportunity is clearly
| there.
| belorn wrote:
| "The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly
| infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability
| to exploit his original work. The court not only
| investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the
| work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's
| market, but also whether such uses in general, if
| widespread, would harm the potential market of the
| original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright
| owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the
| infringement on commercial use of the work."
|
| It would be up to Microsoft to demonstrate that Wine
| impact the market for Windows license sales. I strongly
| doubt they can do that regardless how much they have
| spent on documentation and developer tools. Wine does not
| replace the need for an operative system, and if the
| usage ever become widespread enough to harm the market
| for windows then developers would just support programs
| natively for Linux, side stepping the need for wine.
|
| Wine is not a market substitute for Microsoft windows,
| which is the first consideration that courts look at.
| Courts would then look if there is a potential existence
| of a licensing market (ie Microsoft licensing out the
| ABI) which again does not seems very likely. Failing
| those two tests it would be a rather uphill battle for
| Microsoft to demonstrate Wine impact on the market for
| Windows license sales.
| lolc wrote:
| Yet, if you pick the right lines out of the WINE source-
| code, it will look eerily similar to the Windows source-
| code. And not by coincidence: if Windows' code had looked
| different, WINE code would have looked different too. And
| the important thing is that the Windows code could easily
| have looked different. It was a creative process that led
| to what it was. WINE is a derivative work.
|
| Copyright law needs to be clarified to allow this without
| licence. Just like you're allowed to refer to a
| competitor's brand if you follow the rules in trademark
| law. It's one of those things where you think legislation
| should be rushing to fix it to remove uncertainty.
| Instead, a good chunk of senators is comfortable letting
| the Ellisons of this world make other people's life
| harder in negative-sum games.
| pier25 wrote:
| And what about Xamarin?
| aninteger wrote:
| Maybe just in the USA. But also Microsoft is on Google's side
| here. Also doesn't Microsoft's WSL also have this problem as
| a "reverse WINE" ?
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Except Linux is FOSS so Microsoft has a license to do it.
| dtech wrote:
| Only under Linux's GPL license, WSL is most definitively
| not under GPL
| laurent92 wrote:
| I don't understand why software and other IP rights aren't de
| facto open-source after 10 or 20 years, if nothing else for
| archive and legacy purpose, but also to encourage sustained
| innovation. I'm not even leftist; but even in the
| capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn't help guard
| private companies' rights in software. If you publish it, the
| recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to
| enforce exclusive rights for a few years is already a big
| extraction of collective resources for private interests.
|
| Found the source of Windows XP? It's alright, you shouldn't be
| condemned for publishing it, it will only help with bugfixes
| and security, and as long as the owner _refuses_ to sell it...
| rayiner wrote:
| > I'm not even leftist; but even in the
| capitalist/libertarian theory, the state shouldn't help guard
| private companies' rights in software. If you publish it, the
| recipient has it, period. The state lending its judges to
| enforce exclusive rights for a few years is already a big
| extraction of collective resources for private interests.
|
| How is software, something of which there is an infinite
| supply that doesn't exist until someone creates it, more of a
| "collective resource" than my back yard, which was here
| before I was born and will remain here after I die?
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Millions of people can use VI at once without any direct
| impact on Bill Joy or his even even noticing it.
|
| Millions of people using his back yard at once would be an
| entirely different matter!
| rayiner wrote:
| That means a good is non-rival. Why does that make it
| more or less "communal?" VI wouldn't exist without Bill
| Joy, but his backyard would. Doesn't that make VI more
| personal and less communal?
| laurent92 wrote:
| What is communal is the protection provided by the state.
| When the state has to protect houses, it's an easy job,
| very deterministic, and costs are known. But states
| routinely refuse to protect large sums of money and
| require that you acquire your own protection. Something
| which is too costly for the commons or to vague to
| determine will be excluded from public protection.
| Protecting ideas is excluded for example, because they
| spread so fast that it is practically impossible to
| protect. I'm of the opinion that bytes are too costly/too
| vague to be protected by the state, and today is a good
| example since we had to use all courts up to the Supreme
| Court to rule on what sounds like a frivolous detail to
| most of the people. Ruling on whether an API is
| copyrightable is maybe a sign that the state attempts to
| protect too much and therefore can't even distinguish
| between "too much" and "beyond" its scope.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Maybe after the dust settles. But you can bet lots of people
| will reenact the SCO saga, and now they won't have to lie on
| every claim.
| jmalicki wrote:
| I would love to see IBM try to sue Oracle for the entirety of
| its history of database revenues over its use of their SQL
| API...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| SQL is an ISO standard. IBM would only have grounds if any
| part of Oracle's implementation implemented a proprietary
| portion of an IBM database implementation. This is the
| positive thing about standards, it removes ambiguity around
| what people can/should implement and present to users of
| the systems.
| jmalicki wrote:
| The IBM implementation of SQL far predates the ISO
| standard. Does something being standardized somehow
| relinquish the copyright? The idea of APIs being
| copyrightable is new, has IBM somehow relinquished its
| copyright claims for SQL to ISO? This article discusses
| the possibility at length https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2020/03/before-it-sued-g...
| rusk wrote:
| I think you have to have demonstrated that you have taken
| steps to protect your copyright. I'd imagine submitting
| to a standard would relinquish that. Patents on the other
| hand ...
| ghaff wrote:
| You absolutely do not have to protect a copyright. Even
| if a book is out of print, you can't start selling it--or
| even giving copies away for free. However, although
| IANAL, I assume that submitting something to a standards
| body and having it accepted allows those standards to be
| used in accordance with the terms of the standards body--
| which BTW may not require that use be free in all cases.
| jlarocco wrote:
| > Even if a book is out of print, you can't start selling
| it--or even giving copies away for free.
|
| That's not exactly true. You can't photocopy it and start
| printing your own.
|
| But if you have legal copies of it, you can definitely
| sell them or give them away.
| jmalicki wrote:
| I have heard that a lot for _trademarks_ , do you have
| reference for _copyrights_?
| jmalicki wrote:
| Also note that even for established patents, a ton of
| standards standardized patented technology, and
| implementing the standard requires a patent license! This
| is a huge part of how Qualcomm makes its patent revenue
| from 3G/4G implementors.
| rocqua wrote:
| From what I heard, a large part of the politics in 3GPP
| standardization are about big companies wanting the
| prescribed methods to use their patents.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I would like to see Amazon sue Oracle for their
| S3-compatible API for Oracle cloud.
| nindalf wrote:
| AWS licenses it's client library as under the Apache License.
| (https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-java/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)
| Doesn't that mean anyone can build an interoperable service? I
| can then benefit from other cloud providers implementing the
| same API. I don't need access to AWS' source code, I wasn't
| going to deploy a private cloud anyway. All I want is robust
| competition.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is what Digital Ocean does? I believe the
| AWS S3 Python library works out of the box for DO.
| akerro wrote:
| Using a client is different than reimplementing compatible
| classes.
| extropy wrote:
| The idea is that a client generally contains a copy of the
| API (it's calling it so it should).
|
| So you get a copy of the API with Apache license and are
| free to build your own implementation of it.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| This has already happened to an extent. For example, there
| are bunch of API compatible implementations of s3, both oss
| and proprietary and most of them suggest you use the AWS sdk
| as a client.
| marksomnian wrote:
| Including, amusingly enough, Oracle:
|
| https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-
| us/iaas/Content/Object/Task...
| arh68 wrote:
| Wow, that's wild to read. In comparison (and complete
| lack of contrast) to:
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/com
| /am...
| deanCommie wrote:
| What the hell kind of comparison is that? You linked a
| human-doc-writer written documentation to auto-generated
| Java SDK documentation...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I would guess that it doesn't work out that way. The Apache
| license has the patent clause, but it doesn't have a
| comparable "API copyright" clause. Though perhaps another
| consequence of an Oracle win is that we end up with an
| Apache3 license.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| They've given a license to use and extend the copy-written
| software, including its method signatures.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| It's copyright, not copywrite
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/copywrite
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Oracle has done that, too. They release the full JDK
| under the GPL.
|
| The law around these sorts of things can get pretty hair-
| splitty. My guess is that the situation here is that
| Amazon client libraries and OpenJDK are distributed with
| a license to create _derivative works_ that are based on
| their respective products, but that these licenses do not
| necessarily grant a license to create a new thing that
| works the same out of whole cloth. Should Oracle win the
| case, that would seem to imply that the Court believes
| they do not. Alternatively, the fact that open source
| licenses do not appear to have even been brought up in
| the course of these hearings would perhaps imply that the
| existence of open source libraries that implement these
| APIs is legally irrelevant.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I don't follow. If someone can determine the API by
| referring to code released under the Apache licence, what
| copyrights could they be infringing by building a different
| implementation of the API using the Apache-licensed code as
| a reference?
|
| For a copyright infringement to have taken place, there
| generally needs to be an unauthorised instance of recording
| or of duplication, of some copyrighted work.
|
| I put _generally_ as, I believe, precisely recreating
| someone else 's photo can still count as an infringement of
| their copyrights, despite that you haven't copied the image
| itself in the usual sense of making duplicates. Singing
| someone else's song can also infringe on their copyrights
| over the song. I don't think this would apply here though.
|
| (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I could well be missing
| something obvious.)
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The same sort of API copyright that Oracle is trying to
| establish in this case.
|
| How things actually shake out would depend a lot on the
| specifics of the Court's ruling, and I am not a lawyer
| either. But, if the court rules that Oracle owns a
| copyright to the Java APIs, and that this means they can
| prevent others from implementing their own versions of
| those APIs, and this right remains in effect even though
| they release a full implementation of them under GPLv2,
| then I can't see any particular reason to expect that
| things would work differently for Amazon's APIs and
| Apache2.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Glad to see this take, it was in line with what I was thinking.
| Namely, that APIs have always been an extremely poor excuse for
| true openness, more or less a way to get that half-freedom of
| "letting other people do your work for you" without always
| being required to give back.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I look forward to all the unnecessary type casting we will get
| to do so public interfaces don't infringe.
| System.Out.Println(byte []) is my new favorite function on
| Android.
| rusk wrote:
| Would a tool to do this be illegal?
| pvorb wrote:
| This tool would -- sort of -- implement an API.
| rusk wrote:
| Would make for an interesting case ...
| riantogo wrote:
| Or proprietary software could just publish their interoperable
| APIs under free license.
| xoxoy wrote:
| The Google lawyer should be fired. I can't believe you'd put
| the best of the best in front of the SC and the guy didn't even
| sound like he could describe what an API actually is in non-
| technical terms. I don't see how he represented the best legal
| representation Google could buy.
| [deleted]
| hugi wrote:
| Indeed. This was bad representation to the point that I'm
| wondering if it was intentional. Google might have recently
| realized that, as a monopoly, fighting for API freedom
| perhaps isn't in their best interest.
| pvorb wrote:
| That would have been an expensive realization, but it
| sounds like a reasonable explanation.
| qaq wrote:
| was thinking exactly same thing
| [deleted]
| az226 wrote:
| He also argued that there was only one way Oracle's Java
| libraries could have been designed, which is clearly false,
| and the justices picked up on that.
| xoxoy wrote:
| really astonishing. wonder what google saw in him. the
| oracle lawyer was far more prepared and technically cogent.
| victor106 wrote:
| Google should have acquired SUN.
|
| I read somewhere that they were planning to but didn't due to
| SUN's hardware business. They should have sold that business off
| to another company and kept the software side of it.
| karmakaze wrote:
| This is the thing that really bothers me [from a comment in the
| post]:
|
| > 2) Also realize that the SCOTUS' job is not to decide what's
| right, but to decide what's legal given the constraints and
| allowances of both the Constitution and law. Even if a Justice
| were to feel like copywriting APIs would have terrible knock-on
| effects, she would be compelled to rule in favor of granting them
| if she believed that the laws passed by Congress required it.
|
| So much of the arguments were specific to the Google/Oracle
| incident and not as much about the implications except for the
| thing about QWERTY and perhaps some vague analogies. I thought at
| the SC level it should always consider 'terrible knock-on
| effects' and act accordingly considering but not strictly bound
| to what came before.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, they sort of do. When existing precedent is clearly
| outside the bounds of what's considered "just" today, it's not
| unknown for SCOTUS to discover a new right or reinterpret a
| precedent. That said, they (rightly) mostly rely on precedent
| and the law rather than deciding on the basis of the good of
| the many by their lights.
|
| As someone else in the comments said, I'm on Google's side here
| on the basis of this being the general industry assumption for
| a long time and interoperability generally being a good thing.
| On the other hand, does anyone here _honestly_ believe that a
| complex API some team spent a lot of time designing isn 't
| really a creative work?
| setheron wrote:
| This decision doesn't change anything as long as software vendors
| use a permissive license.
|
| The fear mongering about all sorts of cases in which might be
| affected (API, file formats) area under the assumption that the
| copyright holder has disallowed use which is the problem.
|
| I suspect many will include provisions to allow it in their
| licenses otherwise the ecosystem for their products would shrink
| radically.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| The big question here is the distinction between standard and
| API.
|
| If Java is also a standard, then laws applicable to all sorts of
| standards apply. And this could be a relatively good line of
| defense.
|
| An API itself is not necessarily a standard. More importantly, a
| distinction would have to be made between a standard and its
| implementation.
|
| Technical argument is whether API is procedural or textual.
| Procedures cannot be copyrighted only patented, including design
| patents and algorithm patents. But API itself is not procedural.
|
| QWERTY sequence of letters is not necessarily copyrightable
| because it's not a document or result of machine processing of
| one and as such is a bad analogy.
|
| An API actually has a source code and mechanically processed
| version. Oracle publishes it as documentation, which is probably
| copyrighted, and Java source code, which was copyrighted until
| OpenJDK.
|
| The trick here is to define minimum creativity required for
| copyrightable work. If the API is narrow and trivial, you
| probably cannot copyright it anyway. There is additonal trouble
| when said API has no meaning without an implementation or is not
| published. Reverse engineering may be prohibited by a licence.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Actually, I'm pretty sure whether Sun defended their copyright
| is the more relevant fact in this case.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The questioning seems to imply there's a split among party lines.
| Is that a coincidence or is there some political aspect to this?
| tharne wrote:
| The American right in it's current form tends to treat
| everything as property and is very supportive of defending all
| things copyright related. A lot of this has to do with the
| waning influence of libertarian thought on the American right
| and it's drift towards a more corporatist philosophy. The
| American left is better in this respect, but has likewise
| become more corporatist in it's outlook over time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The questioning seems to imply there's a split among party
| lines. Is that a coincidence or is there some political aspect
| to this?
|
| A little bit of both; the right is more inclined to strong,
| especially commercial, property rights even for things like
| copyright that are expressly, both Constitutionally and
| statutorily, bounded and contingent, while the left is (from a
| judicial perspective) generally more supportive of public
| interest limitations in general and fair use, which while
| statutorily enshrined was judicially created based on the First
| Amendment before being written into statute, in particular.
|
| That said, its far from a perfect mapping and you'll often see
| splits that don't follow party lines in copyright, and the late
| Justice Ginsberg, while one of the more liberal justices on the
| court, was known to favor strong copyright.
|
| in general, outside of perennial hotbutton issues that are
| permanently both highly politically salient, stable in partisan
| orientation, and at the focus of judicial selection, which
| copyright very much is not any of, divisions of the court
| aren't strongly determined by party even when they happen to
| align with party.
| flyingfences wrote:
| TFA:
|
| > Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the argument seemed
| to split along partisan lines. Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, and
| Gorsuch--all apparent Google skeptics--are the court's
| conservatives. Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan form the liberal
| wing. Chief Justice Roberts, who asked tough questions of both
| sides, has often been seen as the court's swing vote since the
| retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018.
|
| > Grimmelmann argues that this was a coincidence. The late
| liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, was known as
| a copyright hawk and could easily have sided with Oracle if she
| were still alive. Before his elevation to the Supreme Court,
| Justice Gorsuch authored at least one dovish opinion on
| copyright issues. In the 2014 Aereo decision, all of the
| court's liberals (along with two conservatives) held that Aereo
| had infringed copyright, while three other conservatives
| dissented.
| alex_young wrote:
| Remember that the idea that you can't copyright an API is at the
| fundamental root of the PC revolution.
|
| If IBM had been allowed a universal copyright on the API for its
| BIOS, it's very likely you wouldn't be reading this on the device
| you're using today.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| I wish Google had just licensed Java from Sun.
| shmerl wrote:
| Declaring APIs copyrightable is disgusting.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| This court hasn't decided anything on the issue, so that's a
| bit premature unless its a response to the general concept of
| the Supreme Court deciding anything, in which case its a
| bit...tangential.
| shmerl wrote:
| Yeah, I corrected the comment.
|
| I also find it weird that "conservative" judges are expected
| to support APIs copyrightability. Is it because conservative
| is supposed to mean opposed to progress? Declaring APIs
| copyrightable is going to hurt the progress and technology.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I also find it weird that "conservative" judges are
| expected to support APIs copyrightability.
|
| They aren't expected to _because_ they are conservative.
|
| The judges that acted in a way which (the writer believes)
| suggests they support Oracle's position happen to also be
| the conservative justices.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| For a different view of the same oral argument:
|
| "Justices wary of upending tech industry in Google v. Oracle
| Supreme Court fight"
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/07/supreme-court-hears-google-v...
| nimish wrote:
| Easily fixable with an amended copyright act if necessary.
|
| Legislate!
| apeescape wrote:
| If I copy a book's Table of Contents, but write the chapters
| myself, am I violating the original book's copyrights? Isn't it
| pretty much analogous to what's in contention here?
| sthomas1618 wrote:
| Let's say Google loses... badly. What will be the practical
| consequences for us software engineers?
| umvi wrote:
| The consequences will be that people will only use open
| standards and languages. Proprietary languages and APIs will be
| shunned because you'll be permanently locked in with compatible
| alternatives illegal.
| mamon wrote:
| So, after initial fallout it is a long-term win for software
| industry, right? ;)
| sthomas1618 wrote:
| So in case of Oracle, OpenJDK will still be viable?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| We all seem to assume that there is an obviousness defence,
| because we are like fish and water.
|
| And it makes a degree of sense - take the articles example
| lang.java.math.sum - there are a limited number of ways "adding
| up an array" can be expressed in English. All of which are
| obvious and based around domain jargon - all very hard to
| copyright.
|
| However what interests me about this case is how fast it all
| unravels
|
| Is this about the math.sum part of about the lang.java part? It
| cannot be the math.sum because then every other language from
| Rust to Python gets clobbered.
|
| If it is about the lang.java then hey maybe Oracle has a point.
| But it only means "you cannot copy lang.java.math.sum and that
| surely is an accident of language design - for example in Python
| the same call is math.isinf. That's the part used in the code
| that I write, that's the import signature. The API.
|
| So from my pov this should be a very narrow ruling - if the
| import signature is not obvious and is unique (lang.java.x) then
| yeah fine Google, they stole your developers.
|
| I also wonder about how transferable the obvious part is -
| math.ist_unendlich is fine for german speakers. Is that obvious
| if the rest of the manual is in English?
|
| And if Google had gone for lang.gava.math.sum (don't tell me it
| was not at least discussed :-)?
|
| It does overall seem a big fuss over a small hill of beans. If
| the supreme court rules in a narrow and well defined manner they
| just move the industry in favour of open and free, in a broad and
| badly defined manner they move the industry off US shores.
| Neither side is that bad for the software world
| Rochus wrote:
| Happy who lives in a country where reverse engineering for the
| purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed by law. So do
| we have to expect more economic refugees from the USA in Europe
| in the future?
| nodamage wrote:
| I'm not sure why so many people here seem to be surprised by
| this, I got the exact same impression from the hearing.
|
| The problem for Google on the copyrightability front is that
| "compilations" of non-copyrightable items can be copyrightable
| even if the underlying items themselves are not, if the
| "selection, coordination, or arrangement" of those items involves
| sufficient creativity to be considered an "original work of
| authorship".
|
| For example, individual recipes are generally not copyrightable,
| but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a
| cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.
|
| As applied to Java, individual method signatures like _min_ and
| _max_ might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and
| organize those individual methods into classes, and organize
| those classes into packages. That act of organization likely
| implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a
| copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures are
| not.
|
| What's worse for Google is that code has always been considered
| copyrightable so arguing that APIs are non-copyrightable is
| essentially carving out an exception for a specific type of code.
|
| As is common when HN discusses legal matters I see a lot of
| people blaming the judges for not understanding tech, but the
| problem here isn't really the judges so much as the law itself.
| We should not be surprised if Oracle ends up winning here, at
| least on the question of copyrightability. Google may have an out
| related to fair use, but that seems like a long shot as well.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| In your analogy, I view APIs as the equivalent of the ToC of
| the cookbook rather than the cookbook itself. Unless it still
| holds that Table of Contents are copyrightable as well (I
| honestly don't know), the argument won't hold.
| granzymes wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle wins on copyright (I think it
| is almost impossible for Google to count to 5 on their merger
| doctrine argument) but I disagree that fair use is a long shot.
|
| The justices that brought up the case's procedural history were
| all unanimously skeptical that the Federal Circuit correctly
| set aside the fair use verdict in favor of Google. I think the
| most likely outcome of this case (especially with the absence
| of Justice Ginsburg) is a remand to the Federal Circuit with
| instructions to pay more attention to the trial court's
| findings.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think the most likely outcome of this case (especially
| with the absence of Justice Ginsburg) is a remand to the
| Federal Circuit with instructions to pay more attention to
| the trial court's findings.
|
| I think that's somewhat unlikely; I think its somewhat more
| likely that the court concludes that the Federal Circuit
| erred in using _de novo_ review, but instead of remanding to
| the Federal Circuit for reasonableness review reconsiders the
| jury verdict on the bases of the trial record itself
| (especially if by doing so it can uphold the trial verdict
| and kick the copyrightability issue down the road to another
| case.)
|
| While the Supreme Court will dodge hard issues where it can,
| it doesn't tend to do it in a way which leaves a good chance
| that the same issue will come to them again _in the same
| case_. When they dodge, they like to make sure the issue
| _stays_ dodged, at least for the immediate case. There 's way
| too much risk that the Federal Circuit would reach the same
| answer if told to use a reasonableness standard of review (I
| don't think it should, but absent reaching the answer itself,
| the Supreme Court can't be sure of that), which would leave
| the copyrightability issue to come before the Court again
| before this case would be finalized.
| granzymes wrote:
| I gave more weight to a remand than SCOTUS upholding the
| trial verdict itself primarily because the court is
| currently shorthanded. I agree that the court prefers to
| punt for good !
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I gave more weight to a remand than SCOTUS upholding
| the trial verdict itself primarily because the court is
| currently shorthanded.
|
| I think you are correct that it is more likely for that
| reason than it would otherwise be, though I still think
| its less likely than a more permanent punt on the case
| (that would still leave the issue live for a future
| case.)
|
| But that's just my intuition.
| cashewchoo wrote:
| I agree. Personally, I espouse the "copyright should not
| exist at all" viewpoint. However, I think in the current
| legal framework, APIs are clearly copyrightable. However, re-
| implementing the APIs should obviously be allowed under fair
| use.
|
| Remember that copyright exists ___solely_ __for the purposes
| of increasing the production of otherwise-easily-copyable
| works that take time to create but then are "worthless" (i.e.
| the marginal cost of each additional copy is ~0 or
| negligible).
|
| From the Constitution itself:
|
| "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
| Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
| respective Writings and Discoveries."
|
| I can see how one can argue that software itself - the actual
| code - will benefit in the same way (though the myriad
| successful open source projects and SaaS platforms seem to
| suggest it's not necessary......). However, I think it's
| pretty dang clear that limiting the copying of APIs will
| broadly lead to _less_ software being created. It 's well
| established that, for software, ideas are cheap, and that
| competitive advantages primarily come from excellent
| execution and excellent VC funding. If someone re-implements
| your API and your business folds, it's not because your API
| was your secret sauce and they stole it. It's because their
| re-implementation - which, by definition of an API, must be
| "the exact same thing" - was better than yours. They produced
| a better product, and the market rewarded them for that.
|
| So, for a legal framework whose purpose, as outlined in the
| constitution, is to promote the arts and sciences, I think
| it's pretty clear what the path forward is.
| biztos wrote:
| > copyright should not exist at all
|
| Copyright is not just about software.
|
| Imagine a world in which you write a novel, let's call it
| Harry Potter, and publish it. And then I see people liking
| it, so I publish it too, but I can sell it cheaper because
| I don't have to recoup the costs of having written it.
|
| Or imagine you write and record a song, let's call it
| Revolution. A shoe company can use that exact recording in
| an advertisement _without paying you._
|
| I respect the radicality of your position, but I hope you
| understand you are proposing to burn the creative arts to
| the ground.
| az226 wrote:
| The reason we have copyright protections to begin with is
| to reward and incentivize creation of new creative works
| with intellectual property protections. If you spent a
| large amount of resources in creating the library of Java
| code, why should only the implementation be protected?
| They've spent a lot of resources to come up with which
| methods to create, what to call them, how to describe them,
| how to organize them, how to connect them with one another,
| etc. That is a creative effort. They then invested in
| making the platform popular. If this wasn't protected, you
| would have zero incentive to build high quality libraries
| or to invest in making the platform popular if someone else
| can just come along and copy it.
|
| I don't see how this type of creative expression is any
| more or less worthy of protection than any other code.
|
| There are some other silly things mentioned in the
| proceedings. One is about monopolies, clearly that's wrong
| because there are multiple platforms and Apple and
| Microsoft clearly didn't need to copy these Java libraries.
| The QWERTY keyboard analogy is also not a good one since
| there's a clear difference between something that is
| written and consists of tens of thousands of pieces vs. a
| relatively simple organization of characters that's also
| not written (it's physical). So that would probably go
| under a design patent. Another is about transformative use.
| There were cell phones using these Java libraries before
| Google decided to use them as well -- the Jasper S20 using
| the SavaJe OS for instance. Also the doom and gloom that
| the industry will break is absurdly doomsday. Simple
| libraries or SSO wouldn't constitute the level complexity
| and creativity of Oracle's Java libraries.
|
| Google could have invested in creating its own libraries
| and only using the 57 or so classes that make up the Java
| language, made its own methods, classes, and packages. But
| that would have been a large effort to design them, get
| them battle tested, and to attract a developer community
| around it. It was easier to cheat to get ahead and ride the
| coattails of Oracle's community that were familiar with the
| Java libraries they had created. Google knew what they were
| doing was wrong at the time, but the cost to get to market
| meant it was worth it. Google didn't stop there, they
| continued to copy the changes that Oracle did to its
| libraries and copied new packages that Oracle created.
|
| Finally, Google had the option to take the community
| license, but they didn't want to contribute back. I say,
| hard cheese Google, pay up.
| az226 wrote:
| Couldn't edit my comment above to add: The
| interoperability argument is also disingenuous because
| Google didn't copy all of Oracle's Java libraries. It
| only copied the ones it deemed necessary to provide
| sufficient coverage for the needs of the Android platform
| and that developers of Oracle's Java community were
| familiar with. As the justices pointed out, it's a one-
| way interoperability.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's mind blowing to me that Google was too cheap to buy
| a license or buy Sun considering the strategic importance
| of the platform.
| luckylion wrote:
| > They produced a better product, and the market rewarded
| them for that.
|
| You could make that same argument about patents in general,
| couldn't you? If you invent something, say, a new battery,
| and somebody else copies it, doesn't have your R&D-costs
| invested and prices it accordingly lower than you, the
| market will "reward them" by buying from them instead of
| you, they're getting the same thing after all.
|
| We do want some stability though, if you invest money to
| create something and somebody immediately copies it, you're
| not going to invest money again. We want you to invest
| money to advance humanity with new technology and knowledge
| though.
|
| Since there's no re-implementation without looking at the
| original, it feels sufficiently close to taking your
| buddy's homework and saying "no worries, I will change it a
| bit" and you'll have Math.add(a, b) and while they wrote
| _return a + b;_ , you'll write _return b + a;_ , you're not
| copying after all.
| cloverich wrote:
| > say, a new battery
|
| It would be more about copying the batteries terminal
| structure, such that you could build products compatible
| with the battery or a battery compatible with the
| products. It snot about copying the battery, its about
| supporting interoperability. That's what is at risk here.
| Sixty seven different kinds of outlets, or arbitrarily
| expensive ones where the "design" itself is licesned,
| instead of the code.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> its about supporting interoperability_
|
| I think this is a _very_ important point. I haven 't read
| all of the briefs in this case, or looked at the
| arguments presented at the hearing, so I don't know if
| Google's lawyers stressed this point, but they sure ought
| to.
| starfallg wrote:
| >For example, recipes are not individually copyrightable, but
| if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook,
| the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.
|
| Recipes that contains more than just the basic list of
| ingredients and instructions can be copyrightable. Include a
| picture, illustration or a bit of creative text and copyright
| will apply on that. That's the true reason why cookbooks fall
| under copyright (while the actual list of ingredients and
| instructions do not, which people do lift out of cookbooks for
| example).
|
| Even when applying copyright to an "arrangement" of items that
| are not copyrightable, as in a database, there needs to be
| creativity expressed, otherwise it will not qualify for
| copyright.
| nodamage wrote:
| While that might be true, it's not really relevant to the
| underlying point, which is the selection and arrangement of
| non-copyrightable material can result in a copyrightable
| work. You can replace recipes with any other example if you'd
| like.
|
| > Even when applying copyright to an "arrangement" of items
| that are not copyrightable, as in a database, there needs to
| be creativity expressed, otherwise it will not qualify for
| copyright.
|
| As the Supreme Court said in _Feist_ : _" To be sure, the
| requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight
| amount will suffice."_
|
| This is not a very difficult threshold to meet.
| TheMblabla wrote:
| I think the CEO of Sun knew this..
|
| "Google's lawyer, Robert van Nest, asked Schwartz whether,
| during his tenure at Sun, Java APIs were considered proprietary
| or protected by Sun."
|
| "'No,' Schwartz said in explaining the nature of open software.
| 'These are open APIs, and we wanted to bring in more
| people...we wanted to build the biggest tent and invite as many
| people as possible.'"
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/former-sun-ceo-says-googles-androi...
| rayiner wrote:
| Whether it's copyrightable or not is a legal question, and
| Schwartz isn't a lawyer. And the answer has to be the same
| for everyone, not just Sun. Now, that might be an "implied
| license" or "estoppel" argument--even if it's copyrightable,
| you can't enforce it now because you led everyone to believe
| they could use it for free.
| indymike wrote:
| What lawyers think matters little. What judges think, well,
| that is what matters.
| rayiner wrote:
| Yes, of course. My point is that Schwarz isn't an expert
| in copyright law, nor can his individual opinion be
| dispositive on a question of law that affects everyone.
| FandangoRanger wrote:
| Judges are merely lawyers who have pupated.
| bitwize wrote:
| What's this?
|
| ATTORNEE is evolving!
|
| ATTORNEE evolved into JUDGEON!
| IncRnd wrote:
| Schwartz's beliefs and statements don't apply. Schwartz
| didn't write the controlling law.
| eastbayjake wrote:
| > As is common when HN discusses legal matters I see a lot of
| people blaming the judges for not understanding tech, but the
| problem here isn't really the judges so much as the law itself.
|
| Or to state it more plainly: the problem is legislators not
| understanding tech, and not updating our laws to account for
| the way computers and the internet have transformed society
| over the last 40 years. This was a similar gripe in the Net
| Neutrality arguments on HN. It's truly insane that regulatory
| bodies are using public utility laws from 1934 - before even
| the mass adoption of television - to create the rules that
| govern the internet.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think the question is whether the utilitarian need to copy
| that arrangement for compatibility reasons is enough to argue
| fair use.
| hugi wrote:
| If I'd publish a cookbook with the same chapters and recipe
| names as a different cookbook, but every recipe my own creation
| from scratch; I wouldn't consider that copyright infringement.
| SiVal wrote:
| Maybe, but imagine the original cookbook as a website with
| hundreds of pages of recipe titles and descriptions, each
| with a link to the body of the recipe. Someone clones those
| hundreds of pages, replacing only the domain name in the
| links. Now is it copyright infringement?
|
| Can designing an API be a different job from implementing a
| design? If so, then maybe the work product of the designer is
| copyrightable on its own.
| hugi wrote:
| No, I'm not imagining it as a website. An API is literally
| just a table of contents.
|
| meat.beef
|
| .. BeefAndPotatos
|
| .. BeefAndCabbage
|
| fish.cod
|
| .. CodWithPeas
|
| .. CodWithChips
|
| This is literally an exact representation of what an API
| looks like. You go to a recipe and you execute it expecting
| a result. And you get one, the implementation of it is up
| to the author of the book.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > An API is literally just a table of contents.
|
| An API is more like a set of mechanical gears that just
| happen to be shaped a little like words. If I change the
| names of things in a table of contents to synonyms, I can
| still use it to find what I am looking for. If I change
| the names of things my implementation of an API, it no
| longer functions as an interface for the things that
| worked with it previously.
|
| An API, despite looking like works, is not a literary
| expression of a process, it is a machine for executing
| the process itself, and its shape, is essential to its
| function.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> An API, despite looking like works, is not a literary
| expression of a process, it is a machine_
|
| If this argument is valid, it means that APIs are _not_
| copyrightable, they are patentable, because copyright is
| only for expressions of ideas, not for machines; patents
| are what apply to machines. And Oracle has already lost
| on the question of patent infringement in this case (back
| in 2015, IIRC).
| rocqua wrote:
| I do really like the TOC argument. If I were to take the
| TOC from another book. Copy only the TOC, write all the
| chapters and sub-chapters without having even read the
| other book (only the TOC).
|
| Suppose then, than I publish the book explicitly as a
| replacement for the other book. Not as in "this is the
| same" but as in "if you find a reference to a chapter in
| the other book, you can also just look here". Would that
| be copyright infringement?
|
| What happens if I do this to a technical document (think
| a 3gppp spec) where the TOC runs for 10 pages for a 300
| page document, with headings nested 5 deep?
| Supermancho wrote:
| > An API, despite looking like works, is not a literary
| expression of a process, it is a machine
|
| That is incorrect.
|
| > . If I change the names of things in a table of
| contents to synonyms, I can still use it to find what I
| am looking for.
|
| If I change the name to be something you cannot refer to,
| you cannot.
|
| > If I change the names of things my implementation of an
| API, it no longer functions as an interface for the
| things that worked with it previously.
|
| This is irrelevant to the API. The API does not make a
| guarantee about functionality. If I have an endpoint /foo
| and later /foo increments an internal counter by 1, the
| API remains unchanged. Documentation supplements and is
| not part of the API per se, which is an important
| distinction. The fact that Documentation and an API are
| being referred to in conjunction, was a failure that
| software will suffer for more than the lifetime of my
| children.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is irrelevant to the API. The API does not make a
| guarantee about functionality.
|
| The only purpose of an API is providing mechanical access
| to functionality.
| Supermancho wrote:
| That's what I said. However, that is not how the original
| case was presented and has affected the course. The API
| "describes something" has been convoluted with the API
| itself.
| luckylion wrote:
| Can you even create a recipe from scratch _after_ you 've
| learned the recipe from somebody else, will it not always be
| a derivative work at best, and a copy at worst? Sure, you can
| add or remove an egg, or change the order or when to add salt
| or pepper, but an omelette is an omelette.
| hugi wrote:
| By that reasoning, everything I will ever create is a
| derivative work. Which philosophically might stand up to
| scrutiny, but hopefully doesn't make me a walking
| infringement.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > As applied to Java, individual method signatures like min and
| max might not be copyrightable, but someone had to go in and
| organize those individual methods into classes, and organize
| those classes into packages. That act of organization likely
| implies that the Java API (taken as a whole) constitutes a
| copyrightable work, even if the individual method signatures
| are not.
|
| The problem with this theory is that class and package
| declarations are still just recipes. There is a recipe for
| making chocolate chips. Then there is a recipe for making
| chocolate chip cookies where one of the ingredients is
| chocolate chips. It's recursive but it's not fundamentally
| different. Saying you can copyright a recipe for chocolate chip
| cookies because it's just organizing the recipes for chocolate
| chips and butter and brown sugar is pretty ridiculous.
| mantap wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what the article is saying about the
| justices worrying it could "undermine copyright of computer
| programs"? What is the difference between an API (interface)
| and implementation? The algorithm. And algorithms are not
| copyrightable.
|
| A lot can be interpreted into the law when it is beneficial
| for everybody to do so. But interpretation has its limits.
| Some laws must be made explicit by the legislature.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > What is the difference between an API (interface) and
| implementation? The algorithm.
|
| Not the algorithm. The algorithm is essentially the recipe.
| The algorithm is merge sort, or depth first search. It's
| the contract the API gives you, more or less. "This
| function does merge sort." But there are unlimited possible
| implementations of merge sort and each one is
| copyrightable. And one implementation doesn't infringe the
| copyright of the other ones, even when they're the same
| algorithm, but you have to write your own. Copyright
| doesn't protect function, it protects works of authorship.
| jacobkania wrote:
| You're misunderstanding your cookie analogy. You can't
| copyright a single recipe that contains components of other
| recipes, but if you had written a book titled "My grandmas
| chocolate chip cookies from scratch", where the first recipe
| is for homemade chocolate chips, the second is for how to
| grind your own flour for dough, and the third is for
| combining the previous two into a cookie, then yeah you can
| copyright that particular set of recipes. But someone else
| can use any one of your recipes independently without
| worrying about infringement.
|
| Think of it like you put in the effort to curate a collection
| of recipes that work well together, and that curation is
| what's copyrightable.
|
| I don't know what will happen with the law, and if APIs like
| this will be deemed a "curation", but it makes a lot more
| sense to me from that perspective
| mumblemumble wrote:
| You seem to have misread what was being said, because you
| seem to be arguing against something that was explicitly
| stated to _not_ be the case:
|
| > _individual recipes are generally not copyrightable_ , but
| if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a
| cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.
|
| (emphasis mine)
|
| The law understands that the whole is more than the sum of
| its parts. And Java adds up a _lot_ of parts. It 's also an
| interesting model case because it's inherently so very open,
| without (particularly pre-Jigsaw) a clearly demarcated
| dividing line between "API" and "implementation." Alito's not
| unreasonable to suggest that a Supreme Court ruling in
| Google's favor might raise difficult questions about how
| copyright law applies to software in general.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Justice Ginsburg was known as an authority on intellectual
| property rights, her voice is missed here.
| jcranmer wrote:
| And Ginsburg was famously known as a copyright maximalist.
| didibus wrote:
| "copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an
| additional 70 years"
|
| That's ridiculous for software APIs, I could be okay with APIs
| having some temporary copyright for a shorter amount of time, say
| 5 years, but that's just unreasonably too much.
|
| Do we have any other technical fields where technical work fall
| under copyright? I feel that's the main issue, copyright was
| clearly designed for work of art and fiction.
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