Trump Backs Supporter Larry Ellison in Court Fight With Google (bloomberg.com) 152
kimanaw shares a report: The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet's Google, boosting Oracle's bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Google's use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracle's co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Google's "verbatim copying" of Oracle's code into a competing product wasn't necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court.
Should be pretty straight forward (Score:3, Interesting)
Did Google copy it verbatim or not?
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Informative)
You can copy the contents of the phone book verbatim so long as you don't copy the presentation. That is, you can OCR it, but you can't photocopy it (and sell the copies.) A header file is like a phone book for functions. If you strip it down to bare essentials and sort it, two compatible implementations will necessarily have the same headers...
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oh ffs do you think he actually cares about how civilized societies operate?
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Uh, did you have a point or are you just getting out some aggression in a power fantasy?
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Informative)
You can copy the contents of the phone book verbatim so long as you don't copy the presentation. That is, you can OCR it, but you can't photocopy it (and sell the copies.)
If it's a white pages you can probably copy it directly. The entries are not protected, nor is the selection and organization of the entries, for lack of creativity. What's left to claim as copyrightable that satisfies the requirements for copyright? Presenting it as columns isn't really going to fly. The leading case is Feist v. Rural, 499 US 340.
It's also worth pointing out in the Oracle case that it is long established that rules, systems, methods, and processes are not copyrightable. (Patentable but not copyrightable). Descriptions can be protected but are themselves not necessarily protected. Further the protection is thin, because everyone else is entitled to describe the system too, and this may result in a lot of similarity. The leading case on this is Baker v. Selden, 101 US 99 (the copyright on a book describing a system of accounting was not infringed by another author who wrote a book describing the same system)
Should be pretty straight forward - Oracle wins (Score:2)
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Informative)
Implementations should be copyrightable, but not public APIs.
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Interesting)
You would think that their would be prior case law here, as many computer manufacturers successfully copied the functionality of the IBM PC BIOS without using any of IBM's source code. None of the companies who proved that they didn't use IBM's source code to develop their own BIOS got sued out of existence, but one who got caught stealing it did.
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Your evidence for this is...?
Re: Should be pretty straight forward (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Should be pretty straight forward (Score:2)
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems a textbook case, to me.
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That's not promissory estoppel. This is promissory estoppel. [archive.org]
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Microsoft changed some things about Java and still wanted to call it Java. The courts decided that they couldn't still call it Java if they changed how it worked. Not quite the same thing.
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Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Insightful)
Facts are not copyrightable, although the presentation of those facts certainly can be.
Similarly, documentation for an API is entirely copyrightable, but the API itself, being nothing more than statements of fact, cannot be. The ruling that implies that the Java API is somehow copyrightable obviously conflated the API itself with the documentation for the API.
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This is the only sane answer. No wonder Trump does not agree with it.
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Interesting)
Tump isn't worried about the truth, the lies, the logic, or illogic. The only thing existing here in his calculus is: rich white billionaire donating money to Trump. Nothing else about this case even remotely entered his radar, and anyone who believes that Trump has applied some legal sense after studying the issues involved would be delusional.
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Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Interesting)
Which brings up a lot of interesting questions, some of which are uncomfortable.
If an API cannot be copyrighted, does that make GPL libraries impossible? After all, the program is calling some APIs. It just happens that the library that implements those APIs is GPL. But right now, if I link to such a library, the whole thing is GPL. (That's why we have the LGPL - it lets you use the LGPL library without having to make the entire program GPL).
But if an API is just an API, then I could write a proprietary program, link it against GPL libraries freely because since they just implement the API, they are now effectively just LGPL.now - my proprietary program is just calling an API, and I just happened to pick a GPL library that implements it. But that doesn't mean the whole thing is GPL since I could've picked a non-GPL library instead implementing the same API.
At the same time, several kernel developers decided to make some APIs "GPL Only" to keep things like the nVidia kernel blob from linking against them. But if APIs cannot be copyrighted, then the GPL requirement is useless. Granted the kernel is a weaker case since the kernel devs officially do not maintain an API, but they maintain what is effectively an interface by exporting a symbol table of APIs.
Whichever way the court rules, it has implications on open-source or free software.
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Informative)
You're conflating "the API" with the source code that implements both the interface and the library routines.
What this case is about is if the API itself, the hierarchy of packages and classes, their names, their behaviors, and their relationships (object argument types, class and interface inheritance, exceptions thrown) is protected by copyright, or is an uncopyrightable "functional idea" under 17 USC 102(b): "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
In a C library, the header file can be copyrighted, but replicating various parts (names, structures, argument and return types, constant values, etc) is not infringing.
In Java, because it was designed that way, there is almost no choice in how to represent an API.
Google did not "copy verbatim" the declarations from Oracle.
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If an API cannot be copyrighted, does that make GPL libraries impossible?
No. You are confusing ignoring the terms of a license to use the library with the abililty to make your own compatible library under whatever license you want.
It means the latter, not the former.
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The GPL is a license allowing you to copy, distribute, and modify source and binary code.
If you own a legal copy of a program, copyright law allows you to use it without any additional permission (even though to use it usually means making a copy).
The FSF has always considered an API to be uncopyrightable. What is copyrighted in a GPL library is not the API itself, but the source code that implements it, the header files (if any) that are used to compile a program that uses the API, and the linkable binary
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Informative)
An API is the actual fucking code that implements that function
No, that's library code. API is the public interface to library code.
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While wrong in your conclusion, you do raise a valid concern that I had not addressed.
An implementation of an API is certainly also copyrightable, but copying an API does not mean that one copies an implementation.
It is therefore also possible that the ruling which concluded that API's are copyrightable was confusing the API itself with an implementation of it.
Again, an API is really nothing more than facts, which are not copyrightable.
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Well, yes. If it's a Federal Circuit copyright or patent decision, odds are it's not really based on an appreciation of the facts and the issues, and is more just going to side with the rightsholder. They don't have a good reputation.
Re:Should be pretty straight forward (Score:5, Funny)
Google vs Oracle. Evil vs evil. I'm rooting for casualties.
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Google vs Oracle. Evil vs evil. I'm rooting for casualties.
Yeah yeah. I mean sure I want to see either of them hurt in general.
But not in this case. Oracle need to lose and lose hard. Anything else will be massively, massively damaging to the software industry.
So go on say it: say you're against Trump on this one.
Fair use isn't that straightforward. (Score:3)
Should be pretty straight forward ... Did Google copy it verbatim or not?
Nope. You missed: "If they did, was it fair use?" Only A AND NOT B is an infringement.
The issue here is, and has always been, whether copying the INTERFACE is fair use. Prior to this decison the general rule has been "yes".
Making it "no" breaks the software industry.
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If what they copied was not protected by copyright, then deciding fair use is unnecessary.
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If what they copied was not protected by copyright, then deciding fair use is unnecessary.
Good point.
Where's New York Country Lawyer when we need him. B-)
Re: Should be pretty straight forward (Score:2)
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There was one nine-line subroutine that was inadvertently copied, by the person who had contributed that same routine to Oracle's code base.
Damages for that one routine were stipulated to be $0.
Every single routine other than that was found to be non-infringing. Much of it was copied from the Harmony project, under the terms of the Apache license, which was reportedly developed using clean room methods.
The only source code that was found to be infringing (by the Federal Circuit) was the declarations for th
Re: Should be pretty straight forward (Score:2)
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Why does it matter? The only source code that was found infringing, other than that one nine-line routine, was copied (under the Apache license) from code that had been developed in a clean room.
Whatever method they used, it worked. The damages for the one lapse was $0. Oh no!
The CAFC decision would find that re-implementing any API or protocol would be infringing, no matter how it was developed. The specifications of the API, to be used by the clean side, would always be copyrighted material, no matter
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Clean room development was both unnecessary and insufficient. It would not have made a difference.
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They copied an API. You cannot actually copy an API verbatim, you can just copy its functionality. Also, Judge Alsup found that this API is, generously estimated, worth about $150, because he just re-implemented it himself in several versions in an hour or so.
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It's not that straight forward. Public APIs have long been considered to be public information, and anyone has been free to implement either side of the API. Oracle is suing to overturn this principle. Oracle winning would be anti-competitive and particularly bad for free software.
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lol TDS afflicted soy boys like to change the rules in the middle of the game when they're losing. You guys are mental.
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Goodness (Score:2)
Re:Goodness (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing about this is modern. (Score:2)
This is so retarded it's backwards. If times were a kid with an age, it would now have a mental age of minus ten.
Re: Nothing about this is modern. (Score:2)
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This is nothing new. It is how things normally happen in many dictatorships around the world.
Two THINGS that belong together (Score:4, Funny)
TheDoNalD and TheLaRRy.
well, belong together on a private island, with ever dwindling resources, televised for your entertainment.
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I don't get the caps, but I'd still give you the funny mod if I ever had a point.
If it was a contest for worst person in the world, it would be quite difficult for me to pick between the two of them. However Ellison is vastly more competent and I'm not at all surprised to see him tweaking Trump's strings. Heck, I'm sure he's pushing Trump to start all sorts of fresh investigations into "enemy" corporations.
I figured out the caps thing. (Score:2)
It is meant to show that the words written that way are pronounced weirdly. E.g. more exaggerated.
And the writer either has never heard of italic or bold, or he thinks neither of those fit.
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That style of capitalization usually denotes a mocking tone. It was popularized by a SpongeBob meme.
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I don't get the caps
It's SpongeBob case.
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Make no mistake: if you work for Oracle, or if you are their customer, you are enabling this.
Stop it. Go do something else.
Re:Two THINGS that belong together (Score:4, Interesting)
Stop it. Go do something else.
Easy for you to say. For a customer of Oracle the process of "Stop it. Go do something else." is a multi million dollar multi year project involving many site resources. Complexity of these systems is a barrier to change.
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Because management listened to Oracle's marketing people over their own engineers. The same time happens time and time again with IBM.
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"Larry... Larry... LARRY!"
"What?"
"Let me into your hut!"
"No."
"I command you to let me in, since I'm the commander in chief!"
"No."
"You're a Hillary supporter, I know it! Is she in there with you?"
"Go away."
"I'll give you a coconut. A big coconut. A really great coconut!"
"Look, I can't let you in because I don't actually have a hut."
"Wha..."
"It's not a hut. It's just a wall that you built around me."
"Well, all the coconuts are on my side, so you'll have to open up if you want one."
"I'll make do."
"..."
"...
Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't really have anything good to say about anything in TFS, though I guess the word "the" is okay.
Tough One (Score:2)
I have a weird image in my head ... (Score:3, Funny)
Of some kind of mix between Leisure Suit Larry and Emperor Palpatine, being backed by some kind of silly Darth Vader with a blond Chewbacca-fur dog on his head.
More Trump Hate (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More Trump Hate (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I'm sure the President came to that position using the same legal reasoning that Solicitor General Verrelli did. Sure, Verrelli was the editor of the Columbia Law Review and clerked for a Supreme Court justice, but Donald Trump is a very stable genius.
Re:More Trump Hate (Score:4, Informative)
I function so well, in facdt that I don't even have to change the subject to hold up my end of an argument. We're talking about the President weighing in on a court case he has absolutely no chance of understanding, other than it affects one of his cronies.
Google will lose the appeal (Score:2)
They infringed, they lost, and will likely lose again.
Dunno why you guys act like google is your friend. You don't have to pick sides.
Re:Google will lose the appeal (Score:5, Informative)
In this case (if I've got the right one) Google is defending a position that is important to anyone who writes code. APIs have never been copyrightable because they are functional elements.
Re:Google will lose the appeal (Score:5, Informative)
Dunno why you guys act like google is your friend. You don't have to pick sides
It's the less of two evils thing. Also an enemy of an enemy an so on.
And they didn't infringe, re-implementing an API is and has to remain legal.
Re:Google will lose the appeal (Score:5, Funny)
Not Pro-Google, Pro-API (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't "which company I like". I dislike Google even more than Oracle (mostly because I can avoid Oracle easily.) This is "do I want APIs to be illegal to replicate for 100 years." And the answer is "no". Otherwise, wait for the shitshow when Intel sues AMD for violating it's copyright to the 8086 instruction set. Wait until MS forces WINE out of existence for duplicating those APIs. Hell, wait until AT&T decides that Linux is based on UNIX APIs and owning the entire Linux market would be neat.
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AT&T doesn't own the Unix copyrights any more, and SCO already tried that and lost.
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You're right. Whoever bought Novell could decide to own Linux. SCO lost because Novell owned the copyrights now. Novell said they didn't want to sue because they didn't think there was enough of Unix in Linux. This would change it so there was more than enough Unix in Linux.
But that's okay. I find the long term growth of open-source being subject to the whims of a for-proffit company very soothing.
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A more likely outcome is the death of the US tech industry. Companies will just migrate elsewhere. There's not a chance in hell Oracle's position would be upheld anywhere with a justice system that isn't manipulated by a grand leader whom the majority of voters didn't vote for (elsewhere we call that dictatorship, but it's apparently what goes for democracy in America nowadays).
It effectively just gives any company based in, say, Europe, or Australia, or New Zealand, a significant advantage in that they can
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Weak history here. In the days of the early processors, AMD was licensed by Intel as a second source of Intel CPUs. A 1976 agreement explicitly licensed the Intel microcode. This was because IBM refused to use the x86 processors in it's upcoming PC without a second source. AMD was already a second source for many Intel chips, so adding the x86 was a no-brainer. Intel later sued AMD and lost and AMD has been happily advancing their processors ever since.
A more relevant case was the AT&T action against th
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AMD licensed patents in 1976 (and for ten years, which got renewed.) Intel has already tried to enforce copyrights but wasn't able to , because APIs are not copyrightbale (what this seeks to change.)
Right, and if this case is decided in favor of Oracle, the precedent would be set that FreeBSD (all BSD) and Linux would be subject to the whims of the current owner of the Unix copyrights. That's.... Microsoft. If Oracle wins, all that stops MS from using their c
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AMD licensed the SSE3 patented instructions. The original x86 instructions were never licensed because no one thought the copyright would apply to APIs/instruction sets. However, that doesn't mean it wasn't copyrighted (copyright is automatic), and hence Intel would suddenly own this IP they didn't think they would. And since x64 is derivative of x86, this would be fun.
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Intel supplied the specs to AMD because IBM required a second source for the chips.
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Yes, and because no one thought the x86 instruction set was ownable. As far as I know, there was no formal license written. That means that Intel just hadn't enforced the rights that Oracle claims they have. If they suddenly own it because Oracle wins their case, you think they won't use it to consolidate control?
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Ah, yes. They infringed code worth $150, was it? In an API.
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Only the lawyers are going to win (Score:3)
I can't see Alphabet on the principle that if they give in here, basically all the code in Android is up for grabs by anybody who thinks they may have had a hand in it.
Ellison can see the writing on the wall - long term, Oracle doesn't have a future, so try to squeeze some royalties from somebody with very deep pockets.
This only ends when one party runs out of money.
Do you need more evidence that Trump is evil? (Score:3, Funny)
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"”The Obama Solicitor General Don Verrilli supported Oracle’s position in Oracle v. Google, a position maintained by Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco,” Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said in an email."
What were you saying about Obama?
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What were you saying about Obama?
He said something along the lines of: "The Obama administration supported what its legal interpretation of the situation suggested, while Trump is trying to buy his golf buddy a new island".
What someone does and the reasons for them doing so are the differences between evil and a poor decision.
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You people are self-parody, and you probably don't even realize it.
Copyrighting APIs would be a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
void log(String in);
Probably half the projects on earth are now vulnerable to extortion. This will KILL innovation and open source and raise costs for anyone who uses a computer. Now a lawyer will have to review every release...then what happens when they go after GitHub for hosting APIs that violate their copyright?...now most of the open source projects we all rely on (MacOS has thousands of open source components bundled in the OS, for example) will stop releasing code. This is the stupidest case in computing history. We are all screwed if Oracle succeeds...including Oracle themselves. I am sure someone has copyrighted the signature to an API they use in one of their many products. This really is the dumbest court case I have ever heard of and I am very worried at how the commenters here don't seem to understand the impact.
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Oh, COURT fight (Score:2)
Man I was really looking forward to Ellison against some Google stooge, pulling each others hair and slapping each other.
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Trial by combat is a kind of trial. I for one have suggested before bringing it back for alternative dispute resolution, with litigants to do battle in the municipal thunderdome.
The solution is obvious! (Score:2)
All we need to do is create the "Oracle Exclusionary Open License" (OEOL). Any API licensed this way is open to everyone except for Oracle Corporation, which is not allowed to use the API under any circumstances, even if they want to pay for it.
Then we just need to get all the major companies involved to sign a Oracle Exclusionary Open License Compact, which stipulates their intent to license all of their APIs under OEOL if Oracle v. Google America sides with Oracle. In addition to all the big tech titans,
The Trump rackets contine (Score:2)
Larry has thrown a party for Donald, collecting a bunch of money to help the supposed billionaire get reelected. Donald reciprocates: orders court to find for Larry and shoot Google in the head. This could come from a Godfather sequel.
Would we be much worse off it we had simply elected the Capo di tutti Capi for President?
Time to kill Java (Score:2)
Using a company-owned language was a pretty bad idea in the first place. Sun was a decent guardian it it though. Oracle is not.
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Agreed. Way back when I worked in a software shop that was half C# and half Java.
The C# guys felt like they were on the forefront of open software. We laughed at them, the only thing worse than Microsoft competiing with you was Microsoft trying to "help" you I thought.
Sun had done some efforts for OpenJDK, truely it was the language out of the two that was going to stay the most open, embraced and with a bright future.
Then Sun started selling itself off for parts, it looked like Java was either going to go
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To answer the old age question of "what should beginner programmers learn?", I would answer 1) Python, for small scripts; and 2) Java, for real programs.
I should mention I got kicked off the Moose forums for saying in a post that people who wrote code
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Yeah, no. Java is a nice language, and it's easy for newbies to pick up without many issues while learning good OO techniques.
Ahahahahaha, best joke all day! Java is about the worst mainstream language available. It is overly complicated, massively to verbose and gets OO about as wrong as possible. I do agree on Python, although it is quite suitable for large and advanced OO stuff as well. (Then it stops being a beginners language though...) But Java? It may give you jou security for a limited time now that the clock is ticking on it, but other than that it is about the worst choice possible.
Wrong title! (Score:2)
There. Fixed it for you.
Let's Celebrate Free Enterprise! (Score:2)
Trump and the Republicans are just as committed to honest business practices [washingtonpost.com] as they are to interference free elections. [google.com]