CEO Larry Page defends Google on the stand: “Declaring code is not code”

At every step of the way, something or someone outside of your business can topple your personal life and your company's life just for trying to do business in the USA.

So you either try and deal with it, or go abroad and be labeled as something else entirely

No, they aren't being asked to "judge an entire industry on a topic they can't possibly understand". They are being asked to answer fairly narrow questions of fact about specific actions of specific firms.

> Sadly in civil cases the concept of a jury of your peers is not a right. In reality a jury of software engineers and the like would make more sense since they at least understand how software is put together.

To the extent that a "jury of your peers" is a right anywhere in the US (the phrase isn't directly used in the Constitution at all, though the right to trial by jury is held to extend to it), it is, in fact, a right in most federal civil lawsuits with more than a trivial amount at stake. But the concept of a "jury of your peers" never meant people of like specific profession, it originally (in the Magna Carta) meant specifically rather than arbitrary justice of the king, nobles had the right to be tried by fellow nobles, and came to extend to the idea that other defendants have the right to be tried by a jury of the general citizenry. Which is the case with modern jury trials in the US today.

> But that won't ever happen in our system because of the complexity of defining a peer in what might be an arcane specialty (not software but other things).

No, it'll never happen today because that's never what a jury of peers meant in the first place, not because the concept is difficult to extend to arcane specialties.

What I don't understand is WHY Oracle wants to go through with long legal battle. They make good revenue on their database ecosystem as well as some other products of dubious value (has anyone ever enjoyed Oracle EBS?). They've secured their interests in Java on the serverside, android is not a threat there.

Is this REALLY all about monetizing their purchase of Sun Microsystems? Seems like a round-about way to make money and it certainly carries a lot of risk.

Sun's documentation specified that the APIs were copyright, and in an email on March 24, 2006, Andy Rubin wrote that: "Java.lang apis are copyrighted ... Sun owns the brand and ip [and} Sun gets to say who they license the tck to" (edited for clarity).

That was before Sun went open source.

By 2007, Google was making serious efforts to "scrub" its code for references to Java. In 2010, it said the "bad words" were "Java, License and Patent".

On April 9, 2008 Google's Alan Donovan wrote an internal email to java-users@google.com explaining how to turn off "Sun proprietary API" warnings issued by the Java compiler.

http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

It's pretty clear that (a) Google knew it was using copyright materials and (b) trying to conceal the fact, rather than taking out a license.

On May 9, 2014, the Federal Circuit court ruled that the Java APIs are copyrightable.

https://www.eff.org/files/2014/11/10/oracle_v_google_13-1021...

Arguing that bad laws are bad does not stop them from being laws....

Android could easily have been built on the GPLed version of Java. But again the reasoning behind the decision of building your own JVM is pretty clear: Android wanted someone to buy their company and felt that the GPL might make the sale difficult. Of course with Google buying, they probably wouldn't have cared, but by the time Google was doing the buying, the decision was already made.

Pretty typical story.

The fact remains that not even Google can reinvent the world in their image. Building a whole new language at the same time as a legacy-prone ecosystem requires too many moving pieces to fit together quickly. They picked some middle ground, java allowed them to tap into the large java talent pool (then and now). Reinventing the guts allowed their ambitious engineers to show off, which they did, but maybe not as effectively as if they'd built on top of the work of others.

A new language for a new mobile platform would have been disastrous. Could you imagine someone saying her is our phone everyone learn it and make great apps for launch in 6 months?

> "Declaring the title of a book is not writing a book"

I think you can make a reasonable analogy there.

This doesn't follow, sometimes language does unexpected things. E.g. a dwarf planet isn't a planet.

Sounds like standard courtroom behavior to me

The audacity of Google is astonishing. Betting your mobile business on stolen concepts and getting all third party vendors on board despite the imminent legal trouble is quite a feat.

I actually hope for some fallout for Google; anything else would be a travesty.

I don't see how this is true at all. We've moved continually toward higher-level APIs. There's a lot more "magic" in String.split than strtok.

If your API is so specific that the implementation is entirely implied by the declaration, then all that means is that the implementation itself is trivial, in which case I don't think your API implementation should copyrightable either.

If I declare my api uses

a GET to /user/:id to get a user, does that interfere with someones copyright that has an api that uses a GET to /user/:id to get a user (everyone I think)?

This is just a declaration. The actual code is buried in the methods and means that actually GET the user.

This is not quite what is going on with this trial, but it's a very simplistic version. If we can't use the same declared API end points, then it will be much worse than patent trolls.

Tim

Though a ToC can be copyrighted. Imagine the situation of a physics text where there may be only a handful of reasonable ways to break down the information and order it. Would it be reasonable to sue someone for having the same ordering (deliberately in this case), but with the content rewritten from scratch (ideal since Google does have those 9 offending lines).

As you pointed out, this case had far ranging consequences for the software industry and any personal opinions of how much you personally like or dislike any company need to be 100% put aside.

- Wine and ReactOS would become illegal. In fact, any layer to run Windows apps would become illegal. The only way to run a Windows app would be through Microsoft's blessing

That's a pretty big one.

That would, for example, prevent every browser after Netscape from building javascript into their own browser.

It might have prevented Mono from existing.

It would have prevented Atom and Sublime from being able to use Textmate syntax files.

Are those bad things? I believe they are.

What bad things would happen?

* Compiling against any C header files, such as kernel headers, is called into question. This has massive ramifications because of many for-profit businesses that compile against the headers of GPL code, as is standard practice.

* Amazon S3 API is widely implemented by other cloud storage providers. Sharing an API between products makes it easy for customers to switch one application between different providers.

* This is copyright, not patent. Which means there is no requirement to register a design, no oversight and no cost.

* It could cause a rush of people just writing obvious API combinations to be the one who "got there first" and potentially harm their competition.

https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/why-you-cant...

[1] Knowingly or otherwise. If a dev bases their code on a Stackover Flow answer they could be unwittingly using closed code.

Setting a default value for an argument is an assignment, a real action that is taken by the code at runtime. The Java equivalent would be in two (or three, depending on how you count) parts, something like:

    // Do the things.
    // If minutesWorked is left at -1, this procedure will use the default value of 480.
    void payEmployeeForOneDay(int rate, int minutesWorked) { // inert declaration
        if (minutesWorked == -1) { minutesWorked = 8; }      // active code with bug
        // ...
    }

This is interesting because the specification being described and implemented is not fully encapsulated by the function declaration/API, but also by the "non-code" english comment attached to it.

Is it fair use for me to copy this API by using the same function declaration but rewording the documentation, but writing my own implementation of the function body to correctly match the comment? What if I implemented a bug-compatible version of the body from scratch, and rewrote the comment to match?

Describing interface with words is exactly the same as declaring it with code. So such code is nothing more or less than verbal description of the interface (or any other description of it using any other syntax).

Not sure if that helps. If you can copyright interface, or just algorithms. Unless Java interface was specifically made free and open by Sun then it's really clear cut case.

I don't know when Oracle bought Sun (didn't look it up), but this is not what the sentence(s) is(are) implying.

Oracle announced buying Sun on Apr 20, 2009.[1]

The deal may have taken a while to complete (as late as 2015), but Oracle got to integrate Sun's assets into Oracle as early as 2010, and indeed that is when everyone (including Oracle) believes Sun was acquired.

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0: http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/ne/pdfs/FINAL_Complaint.pdf

1: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363