Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Natsu | Hacker News Reader

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This is hardly a first. Oracle stuffs a bad, misspelled little poem in their DB protocols, not for any technical reason, but purely to attempt to extend copyright protection by forcing people to violate their copyrights to be compatible with Oracle.

You can find a copy of it here: http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html

Note the copyright statement on the mispelled, 3-line poem with no literary merit whatsoever (which happens to be longer than the poem itself):

"The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation. Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission from Oracl1e Corporation. Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation."

The purpose of this is to abuse the copyright on the above "poem" in order to prevent people from implementing the Oracle DB protocols. I guess they hope that everyone is ignorant of Sega v. Accolade? Even that trick of theirs is copied from elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

EDIT: Reading that deliberate misspelling makes me wonder if I could start "Oracl1e Corporation" and give people permission to violate this? Sure, it'd be a ridiculous cheat, but so is the sham copyright on their worthless poem.

I was going to post Sega v. Accolade after seeing the first three paragraphs of your post. Yeah. Copyright isn't functional, duplicating the poem to achieve functionality wouldn't violate copyright.

Isn't the blogpost violating copyright by posting the whole poem?

That depends on how the fair use argument goes. The downside of such arguments is that you generally have to argue that in court. I tend to believe that Oracle would prefer to leave this untested, as they'd probably benefit more from leaving it uncertain than to spend a ton of money litigating it with a chance of blowing up the whole scheme.

I mean, given that this is a trivial work with no discernible literary merit, a full quotation is arguably a reasonable step in order to fully demonstrate the triviality of the work.

The sole purpose of this poem, given that it's hidden away deep in the plumbing of the system where almost nobody ever sees it, is to dissuade people from making something that is interoperable with Oracle's DBs, after all.

One normally displays art that they're proud of where people can appreciate it, rather than making it a technical requirement for a machine to recite bad poetry to a database before the database will deign to respond.

It could be worse, though. Just imagine if this was Vogon poetry...

Someone should just publish that as public domain, and see what happens if Oracle challenges it. How can they prove that a bunch of bytes sent over the network are meant as prior art and so on.

Prior art only applies to patents, not copyrights. The preexisting publication of copies of this poem would also undercut any such attempt.

That said, the fact that one can ONLY find copies of the work by looking to 3rd parties (rather than Oracle) should undercut any arguments they try to make against discussing it for the purpose of criticism to be fair use.

You can make a very strong argument for fair use in this case. Oracle knows this; if anything, their lawyers are not idiots.

Oracle reacted:

Oracle yanks blog post critical of security vendors, customers

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2969378/security/oracle...

Why didn't Sega just require games to be digitally signed with their key?

At the time, I'd guess that not many people knew anything about cryptography.

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